


The Art of Peer Pressure

by katharinewrites



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bullying, Dubious Consent, Homophobia, Islamophobia, M/M, Racism, Suicide Attempt, Terrorism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-15
Updated: 2013-01-15
Packaged: 2017-11-25 14:10:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/639685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katharinewrites/pseuds/katharinewrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An MI-5 AU that turned into a Zayn character study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art of Peer Pressure

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written for kinkfest but I'm an idiot and missed the deadline and other mishaps so it's posted here instead. It was based on a prompt that was just a music video of "Feeling Good" by Michael Bublé. I decided to use the concept of the video, in which Buble portrays a Bond-esque spy, more than I used the actual song. 
> 
> While the overall themes in this piece are near and dear to my heart, this was not Brit-picked, unfortunately. I did a quite a bit o’ research through Google (and probably landed myself on a TSA no-flight list, whoops) but there’s only so much you can learn. I warn you Brits in advance, since I’m sure I’ve messed up quite a few things that will make you stabby. Mea culpa, yo. It also hasn’t been ripped apart for MI-5 accuracy, either, so please suspend your disbelief way into the atmosphere. In any event, I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Special thanks to we_are_the_same who is not only incredibly kind and supportive, but also has a keen eye for editing.
> 
> Title from the titular song by Kendrick Lamar.

Zayn didn't remember it clearly because he was only eight at the time, but he did notice the way perceptions shifted. After a few crashed planes had leveled twin buildings an ocean away, the friction he had only started to become conscious of grew in earnest. Suddenly, men who looked like him and his father were the designated threat to the status quo, to goodness in this world. When it happened again on home soil four years later, men who defined their identities by Islam, became scapegoats for the rapidly accelerating pluralism that was changing what it meant to be British, or North American, or Western, changes that weren’t appreciated by the majority. 

Growing up, Zayn straddled the line between cultures--Christmas occupying as much significance as Laylat al-Qadr. He had loved it initially, the duality of his upbringing. Life felt more significant than the typical single-culture upbringing, experiences seemed more richly colored with two sets of sights, sounds, smells, tastes. But as he settled into primary school, where most kids were a part of the encouraged religion and culture, so much of himself and everything he loved was emphatically highlighted as Wrong, Foreign, and Terrifying. 

As he grew older he realized that others' suspicions, phobias, had always been there. The Othering had been happening since the beginning of time, long before the first sign of crumbling plaster hit some dirty New York streets, long before the first waves of smoke from the Underground. It had simply been magnified tri-fold, globally, since then. 

Bullying became commonplace. It was both demonstrative with strategically placed punches and kicks, and insidious with evil rumors that insinuated Zayn and his family in hateful situations. There were days at school when the only people that would acknowledge him were his teachers who would sigh and shake their head when he refused to participate in class and showed up without completed assignments. Their reactions always seemed as though they were confirming opinions they already had formed about him. 

Sometimes Zayn felt that it was loneliness that hurt most, the near-desperate yearning he felt to be connected to anyone. He would have given a leg without hesitation if it meant someone would talk to him on his way home from school. He would have easily parted with a hand if someone would even meet his eyes in the hallway.

Eventually, he found shelter in a ragtag band of kids who were Others, too, the kids that stuck out because they all were missing something fundamental that would mark them as the most acceptable kind of Brit. They showed him how to fight, how to throw his arms so his fists exerted the most pain to someone's face, how to render someone defenseless by driving them to the ground and pinning them there. He rarely lost a fight with his bullies thereafter. The rumors mostly stopped too, once his fighting prowess was proven. 

He knew that in some ways he hadn't had it as bad as he could have, like the kids whose parents were both different. The addition of his mother's genes had apparently sanitized him for some, erasing a bit of the supposed afflictions that his father's genes had wrought. He couldn't count the number of times he'd been told he was more beautiful because of the duality of his features. A symmetrical face didn't hurt either. 

"Mixed race people are so beautiful," he heard over and over. It had been a balm to his ego that was so badly battered by the bullying, giving him back some of the confidence that was knocked out of him by classmates' fists and mendacious lips. 

Then there was the occasion that a woman had said those words in front of his younger cousins when he took them to play in a local park. Moments before, she had commented on his handsomeness and demanded a breakdown of his ethnicity's component parts. She had ignored his cousins. When they came home, later that afternoon, they had crowded in front of a mirror and looked at their reflections. 

"Are we as beautiful too even if we're not mixed?" his cousins had asked.

Zayn struggled to think of an adequate answer. He settled for, "I think so."

"Who cares about what you think? What about what other people think?" one had asked.

Zayn couldn't answer that question, failing to think less of other’s opinions himself.

"She was just trying to be nice," he said, faltering, but even he couldn't find the thread of niceness now. He ached for their young egos that were being shaped by moments like these and ached for himself because he was weak enough to crave the validation. Seeing its implications in action, he began to hate the compliment just as much as the outright slurs. 

By the time he reached his mid-teens, the years he was bullied were a distant memory. There was still the errant rumor, the vaguely racist comment masquerading as a joke, but it had quieted down considerably. The connectedness of his social network never made him feel alone and he had a beautiful girlfriend, Rebecca, whose maturity had lent him a mysterious edge, and fascinated his peers. 

Then he went and fucked it all up at a party where six shots left him in a bathroom getting sucked off by a pretty boy with a mouth like a vacuum. He recognized the person who caught them in flagrante delicto as one of his former tormentors, the one who would always bruise his arm in the same spot with the toe of his boots. Zayn's eyes had flashed at him, pleading, Don't tell, don't tell, don’t tell, as he leaned against the sink, jeans half undone and pushed down his thighs.

But the boy did tell. 

Rebecca served a stinging slap to his right cheek when she found out, but its momentary pain was nowhere nearly as horrible as what he had to endure at school. It was a retread of the same misery from half a decade ago with the added layer of homophobia. Though his friends were more disappointed with his moral failing than whoever he decided to put himself in, they broke his heart by distancing themselves. Their group was beginning to bear the brunt of homoerotic rumors that none of them wanted to be embroiled in, as much as they were sympathetic to their friend.

When it was time to leave for uni, Zayn was ready for the fresh start. The promise of a new group of people who had no preconceived notions about him was as perfect as any paradise he had ever heard of. 

He never quite thought university would lead him to a life that consisted of half-truths, half-lies, the unsettling feeling of constant monitoring, and bombs, all due to that friction stemming from maimed landmarks in big cities. 

**One (October 2012)**  
The security service came to his uni one evening, in early October of his second year, to present, drum up interest and recruit. Zayn hadn't meant to attend the presentation, but his roommate, Niall, had spent nearly a week talking it up. 

"Wouldn't being a secret spy be fucking incredible?" Niall had asked one night after returning from the pubs, reeking of beer. His bright blue eyes had gleamed maniacally. He spent the last few minutes drunkenly swaggering around the room, sneering and practicing different poses with his fingers cocked like a gun. "I wonder how many times they save the world from total and utter destruction."

Zayn loved living with Niall. He saw a kindred spirit in him, because Niall was a kind of Other too, an Irish kid in an English uni, an idea that would have been unthinkable years ago. Though he missed his friends in Bradford, kids who looked more like himself, friends who looked betrayed when he left for uni when they were leaving for work lines, Niall was good and kind and enough for him to be happy with. 

"It's probably a lot more boring than that," Zayn had said, looking up from his art history textbook. "Probably sit around waiting for things to happen more than anything." 

Niall rolled his eyes at him. "Why’re you ruining my fun?"

Zayn smiled at the memory before returning his attention to a book. He had a paper to write and he would need to speed through it if he was going to attend the presentation with Niall. 

His writer's block was killing him, stopping up any flow of words for this reaction essay.  
Even though he knew he was supposed to have refined taste as an art history major, he couldn't feel anything other than coldness toward the paintings he was supposed to find moving. He found his eye preferring the garish colors and acute angles in his favorite comic books instead of the subdued colors employed by the greats. Even his fingers failed to create anything meaningful with a paper and marker, favoring speech balloons and bodies with larger-than-life musculature. 

He had been considering getting another tattoo to accompany the heart he had near his hip. It was going to be one to commemorate his love of art, and even though he wanted some sort of onomatopoeia like "pow" or "zap" he had also considered getting one of Degas' ballerinas on the side, along his ribs. They were one of the few Important Works that he could actually appreciate, though he worried about the message it would send. He didn't need any more help feeling like an outsider, least of all an outsider whose tattoos all screamed "gay" even if the sentiment was half true. 

The presentation was predictably boring. A few active and retired members of the security service came bearing pamphlets and brochures about career opportunities and internships. They were littered with smiling faces keenly looking at computers and talking on telephones. The presenters talked up the benefits of serving the organization and shot down the inevitable questions about fighting bands of bad guys. 

"It's not at all like television dramas or the movies," the avuncular presenter in a navy blazer said.

One of the MI-5 presenters was a young man, close to Zayn’s age. At first Zayn had mistaken him for a student, given his less professional attire and relative youth, but he wore a name tag that announced him as "Louis" and part of the Security Service. He stood aside from the rest of the presenters, nodding at the important parts, laughing loudly at one of the presenter's terrible jokes. 

When the presentation steered into the career opportunities segment, one of the men asked if anyone spoke any other languages. Zayn raised his hand, tentatively. He could certainly understand his fair share of Urdu, after years of interacting with his grandparents, but speaking it was another story. The presenter took in the hands raised and went on to note that bilingualism was a skill they were constantly seeking in recruits.

At the end of the presentation, Niall navigated through the people milling about the table with the brochures, deciding he needed another one. Zayn hung back near the exit, waiting for him, when Louis approached him.

"Hey, you there," he said. "I saw you raise your hand when we asked about other languages. You speak Arabic?"

"No," Zayn said, used to this kind of profiling. "A bit of Urdu."

Louis raised his eyebrow. "Even better. We've been looking for more Urdu speakers."

Over his shoulder, Zayn saw Niall grinning and giving him a thumbs up. Zayn ignored him, tried to focus on what Louis was saying.

"Sorry, what?" he asked at the tail end of Louis' utterance. 

"What are you studying?"

Zayn mumbled, "Art history, a little bit of literature, too." 

Louis looked at him curiously. "Interesting choices."

Zayn was amused that "interesting" was the only adjective his courses had elicited from Louis. It was less dispirited than the ones his father had come up with.

"You don't think someone who looks like me would study that?" Zayn asked.

Admittedly, he wasn't the typical art history student at his uni. Where they came to class in flowing tops, asymmetrical pants and complicated footwear, he showed up in snapbacks and high tops. While they lovingly discussed a new disc by unknown noise bands, Zayn was caught up in the lubricious atmosphere of The Weeknd's latest mixtape. The superficial wasn't the only difference between them. Their art critiques were philosophically engaged, while Zayn could only offer up instinctual reactions as evidence for how he interpreted a piece.

"No. That's not it," Louis assured, though he didn't offer a rationale. "Are your marks good?"

"Good enough."

Louis frowned, hummed his appreciation or disinterest, Zayn couldn't tell, and said, "Come with me, I want you to meet someone." He beckoned him toward the dark haired man from earlier, who had all but dashed the many hero dreams of the audience members. 

"This is Simon," Louis told him. "He's one of our active recruiters." Louis turned back to Simon, "This is... Oh I didn’t get your name."

"Zayn," he said as he shook the hand Simon proffered him. 

"Well, I'm Louis," Louis said, shaking Zayn's hand next. 

"I know." He pointed shyly at the name-tag. 

"And he's observant! I think I found a perfect recruit," Louis said. "He speaks Urdu too."

"Just a little bit of it," Zayn stressed. He wouldn't classify being able to understand snatches of his grandparents' conversation, knowing the basic rubric of a communicative exchange, as complete fluency. 

Simon was less impressed. "How much is 'just a little bit'?" he asked, shocking Zayn by uttering it in Urdu, with a frighteningly convincing accent. 

"Enough to understand what you just said and think your accent is good," he answered. 

Simon exchanged a look with Louis whose face was smug. Then he spent a moment giving Zayn a once-over, his eyes quickly roving over Zayn's face and body. 

"Have you ever done any acting?" Simon asked him.

"I used to do theater in high school. I loved it but I don't do it anymore." Zayn remembered a performance in a school play that had won him rave reviews from local papers. It had been one of his proudest moments, though it felt rather provincial in light of the seriousness of MI-5.

Simon gave him another once-over. "I think Louis might be right. We might have some use for you."

"Of course I'm right," Louis said, punctuating his words by pushing some of his hair out of his eyes.

Zayn left with a packet of information about MI-5 and an interview scheduled for the next week. 

Niall was over the moon when Zayn returned to their room. 

"I can't believe you're going to be a spy."

"I have an interview. They haven't welcomed me in yet." 

"It might be the beginning to the rest of your life," Niall said, dramatically wistful. 

Zayn would never admit it aloud but he genuinely felt a similar stirring. This moment felt far away and significant, like he was already remembering it with fondness, years into the future.

A few days before his interview, Zayn got the tattoo. "ZAP" was etched on his skin in block lettering. He got it in anticipation of what he felt was monumental change, to remind him that at the heart of it, he was still just a kid who liked comic books. 

**Two (December 2012)**  
The "ZAP" tattoo was the subject of much speculation among the other recruits during training and Zayn didn't mind. Explaining its presence on his skin felt like a break after his brain was worn out from practicing so much Urdu and Arabic with his tutor for hours on end. 

The transition to MI-5 had been tougher than expected, but then, he hadn't really known what to expect. He surely hadn't realized the amount of work he would have to put in, how lonely the entire process was. 

He missed his family. It was different from the kind of missing he had felt at uni because of the lies involved. He told them he was quitting his courses in art history and enrolling in a program with MI-5 that would result in a job interpreting texts and other information for the government. Zayn knew from his interviews that this was not what MI-5 ultimately had in mind for him. But he didn't want to worry, them so the lie had been born. His father was thrilled by the change of heart to a more practical track and his happiness softened some of Zayn's guilt at the lie. The money he was able to send back to them helped as well. They settled into a rhythm of weekly conversations that were enough to energize him for a few hours, but then the loneliness would creep back in again. 

He Skyped with Niall occasionally. Niall had made him promise that even when he was off on his glamorous adventures they would still be best mates and Zayn had kept that promise. Niall's fascination with his new life hadn't waned in the weeks since Zayn left school and moved to London. 

Zayn looked forward to their conversations. It was a lovely reminder of his old life, even if it only consisted of going to classes and working up the nerve to talk to pretty girls and boys at parties. His new life made him feel like he was an automaton cramming syntax, morphology, and new alphabets into his head. Between that he was learning about government, laws, the Qu’ran, philosophy, sleeper cells and drilling important faces into his head, faces of the disaffected who were intent on wreaking havoc in Western cities.

“I’m jealous, mate,” Niall admitted one evening, a few minutes before they disconnected. “I’m still stuck here trying to pass exams and you’re going to save the world. What I’m doing seems pointless, right?” 

Though Niall transformed into a fuzzy pixelated version of himself when their connection was periodically interrupted, Zayn could still make out the somber set of his features despite his jocular tone. 

“It’s not pointless,” he said. “We’re just on different paths. Yours isn’t potentially life-threatening.”

“You say that, but these exams might kill me,” Niall joked, his voice a little more forlorn than before. 

Zayn shook his head at this turn in the conversation, how two people could fathom that the grass was greener on each other’s side, their own grass seeming unrepentantly parched and dull. 

Zayn smoked with more avid interest as a recruit than he had in uni. He smoked outside of the building during breaks in his lessons, coveting the time away from his books and the little buzz that a few drags from a cigarette held. Often he saw one of the IT recruits, Liam, outside at the same time. Liam didn't smoke but paced outside, continuously. Zayn was convinced he would eventually wear a hole in the ground. 

"You want one of these?" Zayn asked, holding out his carton of cigarettes when Liam's pacing had gotten to be too much one day. 

Liam looked up at him as though he had barely registered anyone else's presence outside. 

"No. Sorry," he said after a moment. "I don't smoke. Thanks, though."

Zayn pocketed the carton and took another pull on his cigarette. He considered asking him why he was pacing so much but Liam spoke first. 

"You're the ZAP guy right?" 

Zayn rolled his eyes. "Yeah, that's me."

"That from a comic book?" Liam asked. "I love comic books."

"Yeah," Zayn said, the corner of his lips lifting at this burgeoning connection. "I love them too." 

Liam smiled back, his face igniting with brightness. They got into a conversation later, on their way back to the recruit flats, about their favorite superheroes and comic books.

In an honest moment, that came with more immediacy from two new friends than Zayn would have anticipated, Liam admitted why he paced so much. 

"I'm supposed to hack these servers my supervisors encrypt every day and they get harder to work around. I'm rubbish at it. I don't even know if I'll be able to ever get to the level they need me to get to," he admitted.

"Well, I'm only here because I look like this,” Zayn said, moving a presenting hand down his face, “and everyone who looks like me is public enemy number one right now. I don't even know what they intend to do with me. I just know that I think I'm forgetting how to speak English."

“Yeah but you’ll be in the clandestine field service,” Liam told him. “You’ll get to go outside of here and see things more interesting than this building.”

He didn’t want to think of what those things would be, if they’d even be worth risking his life to see, so he flicked his eyebrows and tried to ride out the flare of panic that licked at him.

**Three (January 2013)**  
On Zayn’s twentieth birthday, he and Liam had celebrated with a large chocolate cake and a bottle of gin in his flat. It was a welcome reprieve after a day spent practicing lying that had left him exhausted. The recent change to his course of study had added hours where he would sit hooked up to a lie detector machine, feeding a tutor lie after absurd lie. He was starting to believe that he was the personas they gave him, convincing himself with his delivery. After that, he was in the gym learning better ways to fight, should he ever need to rely on his four limbs and sheer adrenaline for protection. It required unlearning the explosive bursts of combat that he learned back at home. This kind of fighting was simple, tactical and deadly. 

Zayn knew all of his training would all come together once his studies were completed, but until then he felt dazed, sore and barely competent.

"What would you be doing if you weren't doing all of this?" Liam asked him once the candles were blown out and they had gorged themselves on several helpings of cake. They sat tipsy and full, splayed with their heads and shoulders against the couch, legs kicked out in front of them. 

Zayn flicked his feet back and forth. "I don't know. Maybe I'd try to be an artist, yeah? Maybe I'd make my own comic books. The Amazing Adventures of…someone," he mused. "How about you?"

"Maybe I'd try to be a singer. I used to love singing," Liam said.

He sang a few lines of some song Zayn couldn’t recall, until Liam got to the refrain, "And I'm feeling good." 

"Not half bad, mate," he said.

Liam rolled his head away and shrugged, suddenly bashful.

That night Zayn dreamt about being on stage with Liam. Both of them were singing to an arena of screaming fans, adoringly singing along to every word. The dream felt so real, he woke up feeling like it might have been him in another life. He had the same dream a few weeks later, still as vividly real as the first time.

On a whim, he stopped into a tattoo parlor on his way home and got another tattoo to commemorate this new life. It was a microphone on his forearm.

**Four (April 2014)**  
Nearly eighteen months after he had entered training, his studies culminated in a flurry of exams, unlike anything he'd ever written at uni. 

For the first exam, he would have to lie in English, Urdu and Arabic about himself. This time the lies weren't force fed. They had to be completely self-generated and convincing. The examiner skillfully asked questions that circled back to lies he had previously told and he had to demonstrate the ability to keep it together, and seamlessly weave the falsehoods under fire. When he was stuck for answers, he sometimes used some of the details from the histories that he had used in past lying lessons but the majority of it was newly created. At times he felt possessed, parroting the truths of someone outside of himself. 

The worst test of all came when Zayn was hooked up to a machine designed to give him electric shocks of increasing strength. He could stop the shocks if he admitted who he really was, said that he was working undercover with the government. They had explained earlier that they put all operatives through it, but Zayn had thought they’d been joking, that these people, who claimed to be on the side of good, wouldn’t possibly think of doling out shocks like he was some lab rat, just to see that he could maintain discretion.

He had been wrong. He screamed and flailed his limbs with every shock, but kept quiet until he sublimated the pain by going numb. His heart stuttered with the increasing distress until they flipped off the machine, undid the hooks that tethered his inner wrist to the electric nodes.

The practical portion of his exams was seemingly the simplest: wear a wire, find a mark and make him or her believe a lie about his identity.

“It’s to see if you can handle juggling the device and dynamically changing plans while keeping up the lie,” Simon explained, after he had demonstrated how the wire worked and where Zayn would wear it. Somewhere in the middle of his demonstration, Zayn had stared at his forearm, thinking his tattoo might have been an inked prophecy of his new life hooked to microphones. 

But once Simon explained the test fully, bile rose at the back of Zayn’s throat at the thought of having to sustain enough conversation to lie to someone he’d never met.

"I seriously don’t feel like doing it. I just feel like an idiot," he told Simon.

“This is what we’ve groomed you to do,” Simon reasoned.

“But I’d be doing this with people you’ve tracked for years. I already feel like I know half the men you made me study. It won’t be some random person who might not even talk to me.”

Simon convinced him to do it anyway.

Zayn found her sitting on a park bench, fingers scrolling through an iPod as the wind blew strands of her platinum hair. His choice felt like compulsion when he'd seen her, and he was by her side with three strides. Zayn was readying to tell her the lie he had cooked up, when he heard Simon’s voice in the wire.

“Scrap your lie and make this girl think you’re dying,” he said. Zayn’s eyes opened wide but he used it, staring at a point in the distance with his eyelids retracted to make tears spring up. The still-chilly April air had worked enough magic on his nose so that when he sniffled it sounded wet, real.

"Are you okay?" the girl asked, tentatively, after his charade of sniffles, head shaking, and furrowed brow had gone on another minute.

He told her he'd just found out he had cancer, had been feeling ill for the past while and knew something wasn't right. Now he didn't know if he would get through this, how he’d tell his family.

"What kind?"

"Leukemia," he responded, with the first thing that popped into his head.

"My grandmum had that," she said, quietly.

His heart rate ticked up a notch when she told him that, knowing the lies would have to be tighter than usual. She asked about the type, the stage, his treatment, his options. Zayn lied when he could and parroted Simon’s answers when he took too long to think of a reasonable one. 

“I’m sorry,” was all she said in the end.

She turned back to her phone, tapped it a few times, then showed it to him. “Would this video of my dog going mental make you feel better?”

She hit the play button and he slid closer to her in order to watch her dog, a terrier, wriggle and fight its way out of a hotdog costume. They both chuckled as he barked ecstatically when he was finally free.

They talked a little bit about dogs, how Zayn always wanted one of his own, but now the circumstances weren’t right, how she wanted to bring her dog to live with her, but it hadn’t been practical with her living at uni. He found himself flirting despite himself, sliding closer to her at regular intervals. Arousal dimmed suspicions. He looked at her with the same gaze he’d learned left people unsettled, serious and intense. She made a joke, followed it up with a goofy face and he gave her the same grin people had bemoaned not seeing enough.

He left with her name, Perrie, her number, and Simon’s voice in his ear telling him he’d done a fine job. 

That evening he learned that he passed his exams with flying colors.

To celebrate, he fucked Perrie against a wall of her room, next to a window that glowed from the street light outside. It illuminated her pale skin, made her radiate and sparkle like some ethereal stone. She called him for weeks after that, incessantly, before he had Liam pick up the phone and tell her he had died. In a way, a version of him had.

**Five (mid-May 2014)**  
It wasn't the graduation Zayn had always envisioned for himself but it was a graduation nonetheless. He was being promoted to his first assignment, one that would call upon everything he had ever learned since he had stepped foot in Thames House. 

By the end of the week, his life as Zayn Malik was no longer. In his place was Zain, just Zain, a uni student fed up with racial hegemony. He was the only child of an engineer who had been racially harassed and beaten by angry anti-Muslim extremists shortly after 7/7. Zain was intelligent but disillusioned, bored with his life an intern for a wind energy company. He was hungry for a way to solidify his place in history, remembered even if it was for the wrong reasons. 

Zayn would be pursuing Tariq and Safiya Masood, two wealthy, twenty-something, American siblings of Pakistani descent. Tariq was the older of the pair and had secured a post-doctoral position after finishing his coursework at Harvard in molecular sciences a year ago. Safiya was a medical school dropout who had seemingly gone off the grid in the States since she stopped showing up to classes ten months ago. She resurfaced in England a month after her brother arrived and helped him to institute a trilingual anonymous newsletter whose main topic was anti-Western establishment with scattered pro-South Asian and pro-Islam articles.

MI-5 had been following the siblings for the last three months and had reason to believe they would be involved in an attack over the holidays. Recently there had been a flurry of correspondences between the Masoods and known Al-Qaeda sects in the States and Pakistan. Tariq, who served as the editor-in-chief for the newsletter, had also been looking for a successor. Zayn was to infiltrate their newsletter meetings and find out as much intelligence as humanly possible on the ground, while the rest of the operatives on the team worked at intelligence behind the scenes.

Simon explained that on assignments like this, a shadower was usually employed, someone to keep the mobile surveillance equipment in check, make sure he didn't get in over his head, and dispatch help should he need it. His shadow would keep constant surveillance of Zayn's whereabouts, accompany him on his excursions and filter information from the wire that Zayn wore, to determine what information needed to be disseminated to which higher MI-5 authorities. Ultimately, it was the shadow’s job to keep him safe, by watching for signs of danger and alerting Zayn and armed back-up to imminent danger. He would be Zayn's second pair of eyes and ears, an improvement on his own because of their omniscience. 

"Who'd they give you?" Liam asked.

"Harry Styles...?" Zayn said the name like he was learning to read, too many pauses between the syllables and squashed vowels.

Liam's eyes widened. "Harry Styles? He's intense, but he's apparently brilliant at what he does. I think he’s the one who kept two agents alive when a situation got dodgy last year.”

"Yeah?"

He nodded. “Yeah. He doesn't say a whole lot but he's apparently good at reading situations."

Liam went on to explain the legend of how Harry had come to be part of MI-5, how his mother, Ann, had been killed on 7/7 when Harry was eleven years old. Harry was so devastated by her death that he had doggedly worked to become part of MI-5, obsessed with avenging her death. Zayn thought Harry’s story sounded eerily similar to the superheroes' creation myths that he read about in comics. 

When the time to meet him came, Zayn was nearly shaking given the buildup, expecting someone with an imposing presence, like a modern-day Superman. Instead he was greeted by a pale, baby-faced lad with wide-spaced green eyes peeking out from under a tossed mop of wavy hair. His generous mouth was made up by a pair of full, mauve lips. He was tall but slender, taller than Zayn had anticipated given his youthful face. Liam had been right about his overall intensity, though. Harry's serious expression barely changed when Zayn entered the room that Simon had indicated for their first meeting. 

"Hey, nice to meet you," he said, offering Harry a hand. 

Harry’s countenance barely registered his presence. 

Zayn dropped the hand, feeling foolish, and took a seat on the opposite side of the table. They sat in silence, staring off into space, waiting for Simon.

Simon finally strode in, exchanging brief pleasantries with them as he shut the door. 

"I trust that you've introduced yourselves to each other?" he asked. He walked to the table, sitting at the head of it with the boys on either side. 

They both made an affirming sound and Zayn thought that maybe the lying started even before the assignment began in earnest.

"I'm just excited to stop having to wear this stuff," he told Liam later that night, gesturing toward his outfit. Since they had arrived, the dress code had been rather plain and professional, a uniform of the requisite neutral colored trousers and button down shirts. Zayn missed wearing the street clothes from his old life, high tops and snapbacks he had lovingly purchased with months of saved money. He was most looking forward to replacing his black studs. 

"How was Harry?" Liam asked. 

Zayn tried to make his face impassive. "Didn't say much like you said." 

He didn't divulge the way he might have thought him attractive if they had been two strangers passing each other on the street, his lips making an impression. He wouldn’t dare admit that the way Harry ignored him had wounded his pride more than he let on.

"That's vague," Liam said, demonstrating a bit of that incisiveness into his true feelings that Zayn had come to appreciate. Even though Zayn often felt like an island out here, he had Liam, a friend who could read the evasive twist to his answers that most others couldn’t see. It was a small thrill to recognize their friendship that had risen to this level. 

"Simon’s on about how I have to trust him with my life. I barely trust myself, I don't know how I'm supposed to magically be okay with trusting him," Zayn stated plainly.

Liam patted Zayn's back. "You'll get there with him." 

Zayn hoped the reassurance wasn't empty. 

**Six**  
In preparation for it all, Zayn was in and out of meetings with Harry and Simon all week, briefings that discussed what Zayn would be doing and where he would be expected to go. Harry would be following him everywhere, through everything, in nondescript cars outfitted with surveillance equipment, manning posts to monitor suspicious activity.

Zayn was taught the new equipment he would be using. There was an otherwise nondescript iPhone with a myriad of recording devices disguised as benign game and weather apps. It doubled as a concealed panic button if the user configured their fingers over the screen in a certain way. The radio in Harry’s car would access an FM station that would play everything the bug in Zayn’s ear picked up. It could also dial into Simon’s office so they could discuss events immediately after they occurred. The wire was a thinner, sleeker, transparent piece than the one he had used during his test. He picked it up, confused as to how it would be placed. Simon showed him how to insert it in his ear canal where it sat undetectable, blending in with the rest of his ear.

“And if you ever get stuck out there, in a lie, tell them something close to a truth. Great lies are close to the truth,” Simon said.

“But what about all the crazy lies you made me…” Zayn began, his studies feeling like a waste of time.

“Those were to see if you actually could lie,” Simon cut in. “We know you’re capable now so keep it simple. It’ll save you in the long run.”

Through it all, Harry was as silent as ever. Zayn swore that the most noise he heard from him were the sounds he made as he sloppily ate during their meetings that lasted well into normal dining hours, devouring sandwiches that were longer than they were wide, and countless bananas.

In a distracted moment, Zayn glanced over at him. It was a peculiar way of eating, jaw open wide and tongue ejected from his mouth as he brought the sandwich to his face to take another bite. Ordinarily, Zayn might have been mildly disgusted, but with Harry the action looked vaguely sensual. He took it in without remembering to conceal his interest.

Then it hit him. It was just the wisp of a fantasy, imagining his cock between those lips, and then it was gone. His eyebrow jutted upward, mentally chasing the fantasy so he could explore it some more, before he realized Harry was staring back. Zayn’s eyes scattered away immediately. He willed away the slight flush he felt and the embarrassingly reactive state of his lower body.

**Seven (June 2014)**  
Zayn’s assignment started small. He was to post on anarchist message boards online where like-minded people felt freer to air their grievances about the government, making mostly empty threats to action. It was a pit stop through a hierarchy of less reputable sites. Tariq was known to reach out to contributors for the newsletter through highly secretive online communities. Once Zayn impressed people on one message board he would get direct messages with invites to another, more private message board. As those users were sufficiently sure of his commitment he would be invited to yet another increasingly more exclusive one and so on like a Russian nesting doll. Each board got increasingly more private, more serious; each granted him closer access to the individuals he sought. 

Zayn spent hours following threads, replying to other users’ rage-fueled paragraphs with his alter ego's own disappointments and perceived injustices. 

“They still don’t think we’re equals,” he had written once. “They claim they’re beyond that racism but as soon as something happens involving someone who looks like us, they get suspicious of all of us. When one of them fucks up, their actions only speak for them alone. When we fuck up our actions speak for every one of us. It just confirms to them that there is us and there is them, and we’re not all humans with the same wants and needs.”

Zayn peppered his posts with examples from his own life, and the lives of his friends back home, remembering Simon’s advice that all the best lies were closest to the truth. He drew upon the experiences that had bonded them together like the suspicious looks they drew when they went out in groups with their hoodies pulled up, talking in a mix of English and Urdu with Jamaican patois thrown in because Benjamin would complain that they were leaving him out. They had thought they were so cool, swaggering around the city, sneering at anyone outside of the clique, getting up to no good.

At sixteen, he thought the suspicious looks were because they were a menacing band of rogues; that their misconduct actually meant something. At almost twenty-one he realized the suspicious looks likely had less to do with the actual banal mischief they got into, more to do with the nefarious things people thought kids like them did.

His posts were, ironically, some of the most truthful writings he had produced, and he felt a strange surge of pride when others responded with profuse adulations. 

"This stuff sounds so convincing, I'd think you believed it if I didn't know you," Liam commented one night as he read Zayn's reply to a post by another user.

Liam had easily hacked into the website, an undertaking born of his own curiosity with Zayn's exploits rather than some requirement. Higher IT authorities took care of tracking Zayn's movements on the terrorist websites. 

"What makes you so sure I don't?" Zayn teased, though the joke felt forced. Liam looked at him seriously before cracking into a face-splitting smile. 

"Because I don't know how well The Weeknd's music would work under fundamentalist Sharia Law," he replied. 

Zayn snorted. "Actually, the prologue to the Qu'ran says 'You wanna be high for this.'"

Liam tilted his head and wagged a finger at him as if to say, "good one."

Zayn fought back the twinge of guilt he felt at the joke.

**Eight (October 2014)**  
Tariq Masood finally got in contact with Zayn one Tuesday afternoon. A private message flashed in his inbox with the subject line "Impressive Writing". He opened the message, his fingers trembling over the trackpad as he read through the contents. Tariq outlined the ways that Zayn's responses on the board, with his impassioned renderings of his disappointment with the way things were, had impressed him over the last few weeks.

At the end of it, Tariq invited him to one of the newsletter meetings that was taking place on Halloween. He promised it would be full of like-minded individuals and that if he was interested, Safiya would get in contact and send out an address and directions. 

Zayn showed Simon the message an hour later. 

"So it begins," Simon said, settling his lips into a grim line. 

**Nine**  
Zayn met Harry outside of his flat an hour before the meeting was supposed to start. He showed up in an unremarkable sedan, with a beanie slung over his head and his window rolled down. Harry nodded an acknowledgement as he entered the car, and then they were off.

Bahaar restaurant, the basement of which was the usual site for the newsletter meetings, had also been home to several extremist rallies. This had piqued MI-5’s interest long ago and it had been surveyed for several months. Bahaar stood in the section of the city where the sidewalks and buildings got more colorful, decorated with years of spray painted messages, where you were likely to hear people bartering over the price of a gram at the corner of a lonely intersection. The restaurant was owned by a cook sympathetic to the Masoods’ cause but was ultimately too passive to get involved.

As they leisurely cut a winding path through the streets, Zayn memorized as much as he could. He would have to trace this path by foot after the meeting to find Harry's post.

"Could we do this one more time, yeah?" Zayn asked him when they reached the drop off point, three blocks away from the restaurant. Harry hadn't tried to make conversation on the ride over and Zayn was thankful. The silence allowed him to focus. He had most of the map right in his head but his nerves kept eating away at what he had just stored.

"Barely have time," Harry said, pointing at the clock.

"We’ve got plenty of time to go back over the last five streets again. I just forgot which one I turn left on," Zayn reasoned. "I don't need to be early to this thing.”

"You need to calm down," Harry said, jutting his chin toward Zayn's lap where his hands fidgeted.

Zayn glared at him and then returned to his focused study of their surroundings. Harry wordlessly turned the car around, heading back through the streets again.

When Harry reached the drop off point for the second time, Zayn opened the door but Harry reached across him and kept it shut. His hand covered Zayn's. It was warm and solid, a counterpoint to Zayn’s tremulous, fridgid one.

"What?" Zayn asked.

"Your wire," Harry said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. He removed his hand and Zayn felt the loss more acutely than he would have ever admitted to himself.

"Yeah, right," Zayn said. He opened the glove compartment, removed the box with his wire and quickly shoved it in his ear while Harry fiddled with some of the buttons on the radio.

"Is it on and all that...?" Zayn asked.

Harry's eyes widened and he nodded twice like the question had been as idiotic as "Are we currently on earth?" Zayn fought back the wave of embarrassment that threatened to dissolve his nerve. He got out of the car quickly, the door's slam cutting off Harry's smug, "Good luck."

Zayn walked to the restaurant, mentally prepping for the meeting. As he approached, the smells of spices and curry greeted his nose, kicking up memories of his grandparents that flickered away just as quickly as they were formed. It felt oddly like a homecoming.

He walked in, said hello to the hostess and wait staff, indicated his intentions by pointing to the back and then proceeded to the back of the restaurant and down the flight of stairs.

Signs in Arabic led the way down the stairs, bearing pictures of captured terrorists and speaking about an upcoming revolution with incendiary language. A poster featuring a little girl lying on a road caught his eye. Her head angled gruesomely in relation to her body. It bore the caption “Look at what they are doing to our little sisters.” As he looked at it again, he noticed her head had been severed.

The basement was sparsely furnished with a few tables in the middle of a large rug. Mismatching chairs were pushed under them and placed around the room as people convened over laptops and others looked at printed pages that Zayn figured were mock-ups of the newsletter. An older Kanye track played from an iPod dock stereo that was set up on a table near the stairs, drowning out some of the sitar-heavy music that was played upstairs.

Zayn gazed around the room, taking in the people gathered. There were at least ten of them, including two other women in attendance beside Safiya. Though the photos MI-5 had provided were a bit old—Tariq’s jaw was covered in a full beard, now, and a scar ran through the middle of his right eyebrow, while Safiya’s hair was longer and she had stopped straightening it, giving her waves free reign—Zayn knew exactly which people were the Masoods. He stood around and feigned ignorance, while stealing glances at them every now and again. They were huddled over a computer, talking to another young man who didn’t seem to be Pakistani ,or even South Asian, but Black. Zayn surreptitiously studied the Masoods’ actions, how they talked to others, who they interacted with. To keep his cover while he watched them, he tried to make conversation with one of the women.

“Didn’t know birds were into this sort of thing,” he told her.

She looked at him down the bridge of her nose and gave a sour smile. “Yes, ‘birds’ are into this. You might be shocked to learn that we’re into a lot of the same things as men. We can even breathe on our own.” 

She rolled her eyes and strode away from him just as Tariq was calling everyone’s attention. Zayn went to one of the chairs and sat down, taking a cue from the others.

Tariq welcomed them to the meeting, thanked this issue’s contributors again and discussed the agenda for the meeting. He turned their attention to Safiya, who was holding a page of handwritten notes. She read from them, about a quelled uprising in Afghanistan that had resulted in a blood bath and charged the British and American governments with negligence. She shared the triumphs of a terrorist cell that was making gains in unleashing another wave of mayhem in America. 

“Thanks, Safiya,” Tariq said when she finished. “We need some writers to cover these topics for the next newsletter. Who wants what?”

A man and the girl Zayn had offended volunteered. Tariq confirmed the contributions of the other people involved in the next issue. The he had them separate into groups to go over the layout, the articles, and the artwork and photos to be included in the next issue.

The Masoods had hardly acknowledged him, so Zayn didn’t know what group to encroach on. But the young man he had seen conversing with Tariq and Safiya earlier came up to him.

“Yuh new here?” he asked, his accent full of the melodic dips and rises that announced him as Jamaican.

“Yeah,” Zayn said, looking forward to starting the lies instead of worrying about them. “Tariq invited me.”

“Oh!” he said. “Are yuh the boy from the message boards?”

“Yeah,” Zayn admitted.

“Tariq and Safiya been talkin’ ‘bout how good yuh stuff was. What’s yuh name?”

“Zain.”

“Marcus,” he said, shaking Zayn’s hand. “But they like to call me Jamal to make me fit in better.”

Zayn smiled and looked at him quizzically. “Jamal?”

“Me'self almost converted,” Marcus began, “was gonna take that name but then realized me nah care ‘bout religion at’ahl.”

“So why are you involved in this if you’re not...?”

“’Cause even though I’m black and yuh're brown, we’re all facing the same bullshit from the way it’s set up. Yuh’ve taken the heat from us for a while,” he said. “People are so worried about yuh that they forgetting to be uncomfortable around us.”

Zayn smirked. “So how did you meet them?”

Marcus explained his story, how since moving here from Jamaica five years ago, he had varying run-ins with the law, seen subtle lines of demarcation drawn, that made him jaded toward current establishment. The final straw came when he tried to enter a library one evening. It had been five minutes before closing and he was hurrying to return a library book that would have been late the next day. When the lone female employee wouldn’t let him in to drop off the book, he had grown testy, she had grown weary, and before he knew it he was seeing flashing lights heralding the arrival of the police, reflected on the building.

The police hadn’t left until they had intimidated him, searched his person and humiliated him in front of a gathering crowd, who were eager to see the ensuing circus. He wanted a taste of revenge, a well-delivered “fuck you” to the ones who had watched that day and shook their heads like he was just another thug. 

He met Tariq through a mutual contact; a fellow academic at Tariq’s university also did research for the pharmaceutical company that Marcus worked for. The two initially forged a friendship over a mutual love of dancehall. When they realized they both had similar experiences, views on this life, they talked frankly of doing something about it all, something on a larger stage. Marcus’ easy tone made it sound like they were alluding to running for office. Zayn knew they meant something more iniquitous than that.

Since then, the three of them had been inseparable. “Glad yuh’re with us. We need more people with talent here,” Marcus said.

Zayn thanked him and asked him more about his relationship to the Masoods. If they were going to be distant then he would need to use Marcus as much as he could. By the time the meeting came to a close, Zayn had learned that Tariq and Safiya’s father had died in the South tower of the World Trade Center. When their family—their world—was falling apart, they didn’t get the same selfless kindness others did. The sympathies they received had an undercurrent of distrust. A drunken, obscenity-yelling neighbor had ripped up a picture they displayed of their father, at that time among the missing, outside of their apartment. The neighbor later admitted to thinking it had been a chilling shrine to honor one of the hijackers. 

As the days and months passed, they were confronted with a city and country paranoid about further attacks by people who looked the way they did. They seemed ready to lash out at their religion, their culture for creating the four savages who brought the nation to its knees. Zayn saw the similarities between them and Zain’s story, even shades of it in his life, wondered how similar this story was to countless others. 

Neither Masood approached him at the end of the meeting. After everyone had said their final goodbyes, he began his way back to Harry.

He had just turned right, on his way back, when they seemed to pop up out of nowhere.

“Zain!” Safiya said. She clamped a manicured hand on his shoulder, let it linger before tracing it down his arm. “Where are you going? We want to talk to you!”

His facial muscles strained to keep control of his expression, though his heart rate skittered, and he felt his fingers bunch up despite himself.

“You think there’s something weird going on with this kid?” Tariq asked Safiya.

She nodded and squinted her dark, kohl-rimmed eyes. “Totally.”

“W-what…do you mean?” Zayn asked. His tongue plodded through the words like they were quicksand.

He heard Harry’s slow, deep voice telling him, “Calm down,” in his ear. It soothed his badly stressed system. 

“Yeah, he has really awful manners, right? You think he’d say ‘What’s up’ to us before running away,” Tariq went on.

“True, we only did just invite him to this meeting, you would think he’d say hello,” Safiya teased.

Zayn hoped his relief didn’t seem as palpable to them as it felt to him. “You guys seemed too busy and I didn’t want to bother.”

“You wouldn’t have bothered us. We’re glad you stopped by,” Tariq said. “We also want to know if you’d write a piece for the next newsletter.” He raised the eyebrow with the scar, hopefully.

“Nothing long, like a thousand words or so. Sort of like what you were posting on the boards, about you and your friends back home,” Safiya explained. 

“Yeah, I think I can do that.”

“Can you get us a draft by next week?”

“You can send it to me,” Tariq told him. He held out a business card with general contact information for the newsletter on it. Zayn glanced at it, then put it in the pocket of his leather jacket.

“The next meeting won’t be as totally crazy as this so we can actually talk then,” Safiya promised. “We had to deal with some other writers’ fragile egos tonight.”

They parted, with Zayn promising that he would get the draft done. Safiya and Tariq headed back into the restaurant while Zayn started down the block for the second time. He took a longer route back to the surveillance point because the siblings’ ambush had left him paranoid.

Zayn darted past a group of teens in costumes with gory masks, splattered fake blood all over their clothing. One of the bolder ones followed him, halfway down the block, limping and making deranged yelps. Zayn fought the urge to turn over his shoulder and tell them that their cheap costume wasn't nearly as terrifying as what was being plotted in the basement of a restaurant.

He looked back once he had put several blocks between himself and the restaurant. When he was satisfied that there were no pursuers, or watchful eyes, he wove a zig zag trail over the mile that led back to Harry's car. It was parked where they had agreed upon, in a shadowy stretch of street. Every so often he saw a flash from within the car illuminate the outline of Harry.

Zayn found out the reason for the flashes once he reached the passenger side. Harry had a banana propped up on the passenger seat and was taking photos of it with his phone.

"What the fuck," Zayn hissed as he opened the door. He slapped the banana to the ground and sat down. “Do you ever eat anything that doesn’t look like a cock?”

"Hey!" Harry cried, picking it up before Zayn's feet could trample it. He placed it gently on the back seat. 

"Were you even paying attention to what was going on?" 

"Yeah," Harry said, stretching out the vowels to three times their normal length. "I saw you almost lose it out there.”

"I didn't," Zayn told him. He snatched the seatbelt over his shoulder and buckled himself in. When Harry didn’t immediately start the car, he hit the dashboard. "Let's go? Now?"

Harry shook his head, started the ignition, and then hit a few buttons on the radio.

"Simon?" he asked, as he began to ease the car out of the parking space.

"Yep, I'm here." Simon's voice flowed through the speakers. "Well, that was a decent enough start to this. How did that feel, Zayn?" he asked. 

"Fine," Zayn grumbled. 

He cringed as Simon congratulated Harry for providing the calm support when Zayn needed it. The debriefing was short and ended with Simon specifying a time for their next face-to-face meeting and his expectations for Zayn's next outing. "Next time attack the situation with more confidence, all right?"

Zayn shrugged and despondently watched the grunginess fall away outside of his window, as they returned to the beautiful parts of the city, with the sights and faces that showcased to the world on postcards and in movies.

**Ten**  
Under Simon's advising, Zayn completed his essay within a few days, and sent it to Tariq earlier than he had requested. It was an autobiographical piece about his alter ego’s life until now. He wove together the points and examples from his old posts on the boards. His final few lines had stated that it was no wonder others had turned to grand scale acts of violence like terrorism; that when people were pushed, there was only so much time before they pushed back, and how he might have taken an opportunity like that if it had been presented to him. 

The piece set off a series of emails between Tariq and himself, Tariq praising the piece, Zayn acting honored. Tariq noted parts that hit close to home, and then, in the third chain of emails, he underlined Zayn’s last sentences. He, too, might take a chance to push back, if it ever arose. 

Zayn knew he was close. 

"She fancies you," Harry told him as the car shut off.

"Who? Safiya?" Zayn asked, as he slid the wire into his ear. His face screwed up at the awkward angle he had inserted it. 

"Yeah," he said, in that vowel-extending way again. "Use that."

The dome light illuminated the crown of Harry's head, lending him a faintly angelic glow when Zayn opened the door. He slammed the door shut to escape the image, though it remained at the forefront of his thoughts all the way to Bahaar.

Tariq made him read his essay aloud at the next newsletter meeting, the only one they held in November, furiously nodding and tapping his finger against the table when Zayn got to emotionally charged parts. 

"What do you think?" he asked the group gathered that night, after Zayn finished. "Amazing, right?"

"Surprisingly so," Safiya agreed, with a smile pulling at the corners of her lips. She winked at him. Zayn played his part, the bashful flirt, by quickly glancing down, then smiling.

Others voiced similar sentiments and Marcus grinned. Zayn followed a knowing look as it passed between Safiya, Tariq and Marcus, finally landing squarely on him.

The meeting transitioned onto the next order of business. Apparently one of their distribution points, a coffee and hookah outfit, no longer wanted to carry the newsletter due to increasing interest from local authorities. 

When they broke into groups, Safiya came over to where he sat editing some paragraphs for grammar according to Tariq's specifications on one of the laptops. 

“Your essay is really good,” Safiya said. “You’ve got a way with words.”

“Only when I care,” Zayn said. "If I cared about my essays in uni I might have done a little better."

Safiya laughed a little too enthusiastically than was warranted, sending a cascade of her wavy black hair over her shoulder and down her back. 

A small voice inside of him told him Harry had been right. She did fancy him. 

"There was that part you had about being a 'beautiful terrorist'. That was so good. I've felt the same way," she said, leaning in toward him. 

She referenced the part in his essay where the girl he lost his virginity to had jokingly called him her "beautiful terrorist" before the cum was even dry, before their heartbeats settled down. 

"Yeah?" he asked, leaning into her. 

"Yeah, this guy I was engaged to was like that. There were warning signs, you know? Like, when we first met he kept telling me he loved how exotic I was. I was so flattered at first. Now I’m pretty sure that was the only thing he loved about me. All of his ex-girlfriends looked like like bizarro-world versions of me. Then, he had all this porn on his computer, called like, "Sexy Arab Sluts" or whatever. Like fetish shit.” She fixed her eyes on his. “Made me never want to date anyone who wasn’t one of us.”

He held her gaze. "I wouldn't, either, if it was me."

Safiya kept nodding long after Zayn stopped talking. “But that last part. You made it seem like you wanted to actually do something about it?”

Zayn chose his words carefully, knew that his answer would need to be perfect for this test. “I intern for a wind energy company, where I’m next to invisible unless someone needs me to pop out for caffeine. I make close to nothing. I’m far away from my family that probably hates me now because I haven’t been home in ages. And I don't even know what my friends think since they hate me for even going off to school. There's not much I've got left. So why not do something?"

He let these half-truths and near-truths tumble off his lips, his confidence growing as each one fell perfectly. He saw traces of sympathy, born of kinship, in her eyes, mixed in with that horrible kind of wanting that comes from needing to fix someone. She was putty in his hands. 

They talked more about her life, how she was so broken up about the dissolution of the engagement that she had dropped out of medical school. 

"I was ugly and ridiculously skinny when I was younger. He was the first guy who ever paid me any attention. That was enough for me to love him." 

Zayn looked at her now, in a dangerously draped sweater that revealed the tops of two perfectly shaped breasts, and couldn’t believe she’d ever been anything but pretty. 

She went on to tell him that her mother and uncle were so disappointed that they had all but kicked her out the house. She ended up living with Tariq, needing the change of scenery, and bonded with her brother in a way they never had as children. Zayn soaked up all the information like it was oxygen, absorbing everything she told him for future dissection. It made him look like a good, focused listener, when all he was doing was looking for the chinks in her armor, where he could break in and get what he needed. 

Safiya tentatively ran the tip of her pink tongue against her bottom lip after her story. Her eyes were spaced out beyond Zayn. He made sure to watch her tongue, like it was the most mesmerizing thing in the world.

"Stay," she said. "After we're done, I mean. I want to talk to you a little bit more and I'm sure Tariq wants to as well."

"Okay."

The meeting lasted a half-hour longer before the rest of the attendees began to slowly pour out. Marcus remained hard at work on a laptop, fiddling around with the newsletter layout while Safiya and Tariq talked in low tones about the distribution issues. Marcus watched the last person say goodbye and walk up the stairs before he got up, as if on cue, and shut the door.

"Zain, come over here," Tariq said, motioning to where he and his sister stood. Marcus joined them.

Zayn got up and purposely stood next to Safiya. He didn't miss the way she almost imperceptibly shuffled closer to him. Tariq handed him a mock up of the newsletter. Its front page featured two articles on recent developments in Islamabad, written in Urdu like the vast majority of the other articles within. 

"Read every third word," he said, his finger pointing to the article on the left hand side. According to the byline, Tariq had written it.

Zayn hoped his furrowed brow was enough to look requisitely confused. He began to read it aloud. 

"G'waan read it, but to yuhself," Marcus interrupted. 

"Never know who's listening," Safiya added, quietly.

Zayn read. He raised his eyebrow at the last word and handed the mock up back to Marcus. They wore varying degrees of the same hopeful, expectant face. Only Tariq's vaguely worried expression separated him from the others, belying the precariousness of the situation. 

"I'm in," Zayn said, after he let the moment pull out a little longer, to make himself appear enigmatic, conflicted.

Marcus and Safiya's elated smiles and shaking heads were short lived with Tariq's continued hesitation.

"This isn't a joke," Tariq said. He took the mock up back and walked it to a paper shredder. "You can't back out of it once you get into this."

"I'm in," he repeated, more forcefully, putting stores of emotion, that he didn’t even know he had, into the two words.

Tariq bit his lip to contain the flares of a huge grin. "Okay."

In ways, their genuine happiness reflected the happiness Zayn felt. The only difference was, that while they celebrated a new comrade in their ranks, he celebrated the reason that finally made everything he had ever endured here worthwhile.

He had finagled intelligence. 

**Eleven**  
While there were no ghouls and monsters ornamenting the sidewalks this time, Zayn looked over his shoulder more often than the last time he'd darted down these streets. With his head full of precious information, the threat felt more real. He kept waiting for them to ambush him again, to say that this had been a ruse, they knew who he really was. When he stopped to think, he realized he was being ridiculous. They probably wouldn't say anything, merely murder him.

His heart was beating erratically by the time he hopped in the car. Harry's head was retracted toward his neck, his chest rising and falling too evenly. 

"What the fuck, are you asleep?" Zayn asked. He popped out the ear piece, squinting as he dug the tips of his thumb and finger into the opening of his ear canal to retrieve it.

Harry jerked suddenly, knocking the back of his hand into the steering wheel. "No!" he cried, enfolding his hurt hand in the other. 

Zayn glared at him in response as he popped the wire into its tiny case and replaced it in the glove compartment.

Harry started the car. "So, what was the thing with the paper they gave you?"

"They wanted to know if I had any interest in helping them blow up some department stores on Christmas Eve."

"Fuck me," Harry said under his breath. "You know how many people that would knock out?"

The safety of hundreds of people he had never met, resting on his shoulder, made the meager dinner he had managed to eat earlier somersault in his stomach. He gripped the edge of his seat to give his mind something else to focus on, fighting a strong surge of sickness. 

"It's not even just the people. It's the buildings they’ve chosen, too. It'll be a statement,” Zayn found himself saying. 

Harry darted his eyes to the passenger side. "Are you okay?"

Zayn thought he saw a glimmer of worry in them by the headlights of an oncoming car, but it was over in a flash.

"Yeah."

Harry looked at him like he didn't quite believe him, but reached toward the radio, arranged the buttons to the right wavelength to pick up on Simon’s call. Zayn swallowed back the edge of vomit he tasted and steeled himself. It was not time for a hero's crisis of faith. Not yet.

**Twelve**  
Zayn didn’t think they would get a chance to attend the annual Christmas party. It was the one time a year that the weight of the world was lifted, momentarily, from their shoulders with mild merriment. In past years he had come to appreciate it when the utter seriousness of his work had sapped his energy. 

Simon had assured Zayn that he didn’t see why he or Harry should miss it. It was on the stipulation that they would need to leave early in order to make another meeting with the Masoods and Marcus that night.

“You’re working undercover, you’re not giving your life over to us. You can have a bit of fun," Simon had said. 

Zayn held his tongue, even though he felt like he had given his life over to MI-5.

"I think some of our current operatives need that taste of normality more than the others," Simon went on.

As usual, it was hosted in a local hotel's ballroom, under the guise of a wind energy company's annual Christmas party. He had learned early on that many other undercover operatives also claimed to work for the wind energy outfit, as well. It gave them all reason to be congregated, regularly, without inviting too much suspicion. 

The hotel they had chosen this year outdid itself. Festive decorations hung from the ceilings and a large Christmas tree had been placed in the middle of the grand hall, decked in glowing ornaments. Twinkling Christmas music was the background to the din of conversation. It felt like a winter wonderland, bright and cheery, in all of its mawkish holiday splendor. Zayn had already explained to his family that he wouldn't be home for Christmas, and though they claimed to be happy he was working so hard and so passionately, he heard the melancholy beneath their words. The holiday cheer was a welcome presence.

As he walked through the double doors, Zayn could never reconcile the fact that every other day of the year these same people were painfully serious and shrewd. But on this night everyone's attitude was as buoyant as the bubbles in the sparkling cider that filled their glasses. 

Zayn saw Liam lingering by a bowl of punch and a spread of food and made a beeline toward him. On the way over, he ran into his old tutors who commended his work on his assignment, wistfully recalling how far he had come since he first arrived. Zayn indulged them as long as he could then begged off, claiming hunger.

"I'm still shit at parties," he said to Liam once he had arrived by his side.

Liam swirled the red punch in his cup. "Me too. I'm so glad you're here. How’s the double life?"

Zayn shrugged. He mindlessly turned toward a spread of hors d'oeuvres and popped the most appetizing one into his mouth. His tongue was greeted by salty cheese and meat.

"How's working with Harry?" Liam asked.

"I can't stand him," Zayn said as he chewed. "He's such an odd bloke. The other night when I got back to his car he was Instagramming a banana."

Liam frowned at him incredulously, then laughed. "That's quite odd." 

"Yeah, I don't know. Last night, he fell asleep. But that's who's supposed to keep me safe. I'm not quite sure he knows how to spell his own name."

"He seems normal otherwise." Liam pointed Harry out with his cup. Harry was embroiled in a conversation with an older woman. He was in the midst of relating a story to her, hands helping to frame the scene. She was utterly engaged, open-mouthed laughing when he got to the punchline of whatever he was saying. She leaned into him and rested her hand on his arm. 

Zayn felt a wild surge of jealousy. Harry was so completely different with this woman, joyously charming and carefree, but with Zayn he was all smoke and mirrors. Granted, Zayn hadn't any idea how this relationship was forged, if this was a slow burn or instantaneous connectedness, but it bothered him.

"How is he like that with her and with me..." Zayn trailed off, shaking his head.

"Maybe you should make the effort?" Liam suggested.

"I have been!"

"Zayn, your idea of making an effort to be social is grunting and smoking cigarettes. I suppose sometimes you offer the cigarettes, so there is that, but I practically had to chat enough for two people at the beginning."

Before Zayn could invent protestations, Louis interrupted. "My favorite, and best, recruit!"

Louis was sporting an exceptionally hideous sweater featuring a Christmas tree made of sparkly green thread next to a Santa Claus with a huge bag of presents. The proportions of the scene were slightly off-kilter, giving Santa a deformed appearance. A reindeer antler headband festooned Louis' hair. He held a full shopping bag in one hand.

"What the fuck is your sweater, mate?" Zayn said. 

"D'you like? I found it in a charity shop for 50p. Anyway, I come bearing gifts." Louis rifled through the bag and presented them with two Santa hats. 

"No thanks, I don't do..." Zayn started but Liam grabbed the hats and placed one on his head.

"I love peer pressure," Louis said, as Liam held out the other. 

Zayn wordlessly took it and affixed it on his head. 

"You look beautiful. Merry Christmas, lads!" Louis bounded off toward another group. 

"I look like a prick."

"No more so than usual," Liam offered, amicably.

Zayn gave him a withering look and returned his attention to Harry. The woman he had been talking to was nowhere to be found and he was standing alone, sipping his drink while others chatted around him.

"I guess he scared off that bird," Zayn observed.

Liam followed his gaze. "Why don't you go over to him, now?" 

"And do what, Li? Declare that we're best mates?”

"Maybe not declare, but try to get started down that road with cordial conversation." 

Zayn wanted to argue, wanted to admit that he would rather go through the electric shock test again, but Liam's earnestness wore down his defense.

"You'll be okay?" 

"This is a party, Zayn, you're not leaving me out in the desert to die," Liam said. He flashed his hand in a motion that said "go."

Zayn was by Harry's side within a minute, bracing himself for an inevitable stonewalling. 

"Are you enjoying the party?" he asked, lamely. 

Harry gave him a coy smile. "I like your hat."

Zayn fought an urge to snatch it from his head. Its presence only made him feel more awkward. "Thanks," he mumbled. 

They stood together staring at the goings on beyond each other. The jingly Christmas music stopped and along with it, conversation hushed. Simon came to the forefront and gave a short speech, thanking everyone in vague terms for their work and commitment in the past year. After he walked off and the applause died down, Louis took to the stage, proclaiming the beginning of this year's ugly Christmas gift exchange.

"Did you bring anything for this?" Zayn asked.

"No," Harry drawled. "I figured we would be gone by now."

Zayn consulted with his watch. They had almost an hour and a half before they needed to leave. 

"Me, too."

Zayn's attention flickered back to the balcony he had seen just off a side door earlier in the evening. He had nearly a full carton of cigarettes in his pocket and was dying for one. At this point he would have settled for a secondhand whiff of smoke. 

"I think I'm going to get some air," he said, thumbing in the direction of the balcony.

Harry grunted an acknowledgment. 

"You want to join me?" Zayn tacked on the last part recklessly, uneasily. 

"You wouldn't rather be alone?" Harry asked, reading Zayn's thoughts. 

"Yeah I would, but I'm fucking trying with you." 

Zayn turned and started to walk off. He looked back, half-expecting Harry to still be back where he left him, but he was only two strides behind, following the path Zayn cut through the party-goers.

**Thirteen**  
The damp, December night air had burrowed through Zayn's party clothing. He rolled his shoulders and crossed his arms over his chest in an attempt to stay warm. He was three drags into his cigarette and enjoying the slow, relaxing coil of each exhalation. 

Harry leaned against the railing, overlooking the street two stories below. The lights of the city decorated the night like hazy-edged jewels. Distantly an ambulance sounded.

"So why did you get into this?" Harry surprised Zayn by asking. A breeze picked up, ruffling his hair.

Zayn held onto his drag a beat longer than usual, thinking.

"Why are you asking me that?" he eventually said,

"Because everyone else, they have a story behind this. Even me. But you, I'm not sure why you're here. It's random...it's random to me."

The way Harry stated it was innocuous enough but Zayn couldn't help the flare of anger he felt. "Piss off! Why do I need a reason and why the fuck do I need to tell it to you?" He took another drag from his cigarette and hissed it out of his nose and mouth.

"You don't, I was," Harry began. "Nevermind."

"No you have something to say, so say it," Zayn urged him. The flare of anger had turned into full-fledged swell of rage. 

Harry's lips made a few articulatory gestures, but no sound left them. He finally gave it up, waving Zayn off. "No, nevermind."

"You're a fucking twat, you know that?" Zayn pointed at him, accusatory. "You're supposed to make sure I end up alive at the end of this but I don’t think you even give a fuck. I don’t want to die and I don’t want to kill people in the process, so could you pretend to want to help me instead of acting like this lost child, because I have enough to deal with on my own.” 

Harry let him yell, let him work out the broiling frustration he had been tamping down for the last few weeks, without saying anything in return. His eyes merely held Zayn's, his blank expression giving away nothing. 

It made Zayn even more upset. By the end of it, he was breathing hard, struggling to get control of himself. The rational side of himself knew he was taking out everything he felt on Harry, letting the fears that he had to numb out on a daily basis spill over into this fight. Zayn knew how to deal with it if Harry fought back, yelled, did something other than listen quietly. If he didn't leave he would not be responsible for the actions of his fists. He waited afterward, to see if Harry would defend himself or even break from his aloofness, but he didn't.

"Fuck this," Zayn said, dropping his cigarette and stubbing it out with his toe. He turned to enter the party again, sounds of it spilling outside when he cracked the door.

"It's better if I don't care," Harry said.

Zayn stopped with his fingers wrapped around the door knob. He closed the door, abruptly cutting off the distracting noise.

"What?"

"If we start acting like friends, then we become friends and then I start to care." Harry looked down at the streets below again. "You could die doing this. If I care it's not easy to do my job. I'll start panicking when you're out there, instead of staying calm and looking out for trouble."

Each word seemed to be ejected from his mouth at a slower rate than the last but Zayn listened like his life depended on it. In a way it did. Zayn didn't know whether to appreciate the honesty or throw up at the terrifying thought. He could die. Tariq or Safiya or Marcus or any of the others in the group could get smart to him, unravel the thread of his lies, kill him for it.

Zayn turned and leaned against the door, tilting the base of his skull against it, and swallowing hard. He felt deflated, like all the air had been sucked out of him.

"Yeah," he sighed. 

Harry pressed his back against the railing, facing Zayn. His face was drawn. 

"I got into this because I didn't know what else to do. Because I was studying art history and had no idea what to do with my life and this just fell into my lap and I was finally part of something that wanted me." He paused. "Now I'm in over my fucking head."

At first, Harry looked like he didn't remember what Zayn was referencing but realization dawned on him, soon enough. 

"So what you told them was true," was all he said. 

"Just a tiny bit."

Zayn reached into his pocket and retrieved his cigarettes, needing the nicotine to numb the raw truths of these nocturnal confessions. He lit one under Harry's discerning gaze. Zayn offered him one but he declined. 

"Can I have just a taste?" 

Zayn handed him the cigarette while he replaced the lighter and cigarettes in his trousers. Harry took a short pull, blew his exhalation upwards through pursed lips, that fluffed the hair that fell over his forehead.

"And you?" Zayn asked, feeling brave. "It's all because of your mom?"

"Where'd you hear that?"

Zayn shrugged. 

"Not all because of her but she was a big reason," Harry admitted. "I used to worry about her all the time as a kid. Maybe I knew how it was going to end? She was on her way to some modeling agency that scouted her. I think she felt shit about the way she looked after my dad left her. They told maybe she could do some catalogue work. She was excited. Anyway, she never made it to the office."

Harry stated the facts frankly, reciting it like distant historical events. It was something that happened to other people. At one point he stopped, looked like he was losing a bit of control, but he paused, swallowed, and then carried on. Zayn was thankful for that. The story was heart-rendering enough without the added theatrics of tears. 

"So you stalked MI-5 and one day they finally recruited you?"

"Something like that, except I was sleeping with one of the recruiters for a while before I was invited."

Zayn thought of the woman Harry had been talking to. "Oh that bird from earlier?"

"No, not her. Louis."

Zayn coughed, choking on the remaining bit of smoke that he'd been expelling from his lungs. "Louis, Louis?" he asked when the throat-scraping coughs had subsided. 

Harry's lips parted over his teeth, dimples book-ending his mouth. He glanced down, bashfully. "Louis, Louis." 

"You're...?" 

"I dabble." Harry answered before Zayn could finish it.

Zayn was slightly consoled by this, that all those times he found himself really noticing Harry, weren't the wishful daydreams of a lad starved for any kind of human touch. There had been a chance he wouldn't have found Zayn's most salacious thoughts depraved, but just as sexy. That is, if Zayn had acted like anything less than a massive prick since the beginning of their partnership, if he found Zayn at all alluring underneath all his obfuscating defenses. 

The atmosphere between them seemed changed somehow, lazy smiles hanging on both of their faces, but a man exiting the party with cigarettes and a pretty brunette in hand broke the spell. 

Zayn checked his watch. They would need to be going anyway. He looked over, snapped his head toward the door. It was show time. 

**Fourteen**  
Zayn hadn't thought that he would feel self-conscious as he stripped off his party clothes, slipped into his street clothes. These weren’t the circumstances under which he had envisioned disrobing in Harry's presence. He had imagined the process would have happened under the intoxicating mixture of a little bit of liquor and arousal. Nevertheless, he fought off images of the things they could be doing as he aimed his legs through a pair of jeans, shifting toward the shadowy part of the car to hide his growing erection. Harry's eyes were on the road and Zayn silently prayed he wouldn’t choose the wrong time to turn and find him in the state he was in. His prayers were answered, though Zayn swore there was a fleeting moment at a stoplight that Harry had glanced over and lingered a second more than was reasonable. It was over so quickly he just as easily thought he had fabricated the whole thing.

They were silent on the ride to the usual drop off point. Harry turned on Radio 1, filling the car with the odd babble from the DJs in between songs. Harry turned it down once they had arrived at the destination, flipping a few switches to get the wire’s frequency while Zayn popped in the earpiece. He took one last look in the sun visor mirror, scraped his hair up where changing clothes had flattened it, and was ready to go.

"Oh wait," Harry said, reaching across Zayn's lap. Zayn shrank back from his arm until he realized Harry was opening the glove compartment. He handed him a pea-sized object. "Simon wanted me to give you this."

"What is it?" Zayn asked, tilting it into the stream of light a street lamp shone into the car.

"A bug. Just stick it somewhere discreet near Tariq or Safiya and leave it there. It'll help the back up team hear better."

Zayn pocketed the item and undid his seatbelt. "See you in a bit then," he said and began to open the door.

"Be careful," Harry told him. He gave a curt nod in response, then headed down the street toward Bahaar.

**Fifteen**  
Zayn rid himself of the bug soon after he settled into the basement, depositing it near the laptop Tariq favored when mocking up layouts and discussing edits. 

The meeting was longer than normal, to attribute for the length of time that had passed since the last meeting. Tariq had been away in the US, delivering a paper at a conference. Zayn didn't know whether or not to find it funny that a man who planned to commit suicide and take the lives of his sister, his friends and strangers, was still performing the normal activities of life and his job. Life truly did go on.While he had been gone, Safiya had kept in contact with Zayn, sending him vague email updates punctuated with emoticons and ellipses that things were progressing well. 

By the time the last person started up the basement stairs, it felt like almost an eternity had passed. Zayn's emotions had been all over the place since the party and the wait had only made him impatient and more volatile.

Tariq and Marcus quickly began gathering things up, while Safiya turned off the speakers and iPod and started straightening tables.

"So we have two weeks..." Zayn trailed off, impatience getting the best of him. 

Safiya put a finger to her lips that were traced in a bright vermillion shade. She pointed around the room, then tapped her ear. 

Marcus and Tariq both gave him meaningful looks. 

Zayn briefly felt a white flash of terror that he had been found out, before Safiya gestured up the stairs and said in Urdu, "Listeners."

Zayn nodded, still feeling uneasy, but helped her move another table. When the room was sufficiently cleared off, they grabbed their coats and went up the stairs.

They were all quiet, though Tariq broke the silence by saying goodbye to the cook and thanking him again for use of the basement. The cook tried to con Tariq into taking some food with him but he countered with good-natured refusal, claiming a full stomach. Tariq kept moving, hands flapping at the cook's continued insistence that he take something home. The cook set his sights on the others but Tariq pushed them through the restaurant quickly. He stopped to drop off the keys with the hostess while the others waited outside.

At the frigid air, Safiya slid her arm through the slot his elbow and side made, huddling close to him. Marcus looked from her to Zayn.

"Safiya, yuh too desperate," he quipped.

"Shut up," she said.

"Let's go," Tariq said, emerging from the restaurant.

Zayn let them lead him for two blocks before he asked, "Where're we going?"

"Somewhere fih talk," Marcus said when no one else answered.

The somewhere turned out to be a car, Tariq's car. 

"Here?" he asked, stupidly. Being locked in a car with them seemed like a terrible idea. 

"Yes," Tariq told him. "It's the only place I'm reasonably sure isn't bugged right now."

Zayn breathed a slight sigh of relief. 

"How do we know Zain isn't wired?" Safiya asked. Zayn's heart skipped but the memory of Harry's "She fancies you" stopped it from pounding.

"You can do a full body search on me," he told her, fixing her with a serious look, spreading his arms wide. His eyebrow cut a suggestive angle. 

Safiya gave him a flirty punch on his side, but not before her hand made a lazy path across his lower abdomen. "Zain's clear," she declared, before opening the passenger side door. Zayn gave her ass a playful squeeze as she bent to get into the car.

Tariq didn't miss the action and gave Zayn a warning look as he climbed into the drivers seat. He started the car once everyone had gathered inside. 

"We don't talk about anything in that basement anymore," he said, easing out of the parking space. "I'm positive they know something."

"Who's they?" Zayn asked, unsure if it was paranoia or an accurate premonition. 

"MI-5."

No one talked for a while after it was said, the throbbing bass of the music that Tariq had turned on, the only sound in the car. They turned down a lonely street, got caught at an desolate intersection, waiting for an old woman, bundled in her heavy down jacket and a scarf that covered the lower half of her face, to pass. She stared into the car while she crossed the road, headlights revealing mistrusting, knitted eyebrows.

"Does anything make old white people more worried than four minorities in a car, blasting rap?" Tariq wondered.

They all chuckled, Zayn laughing because it was the most genuine moment he had had with them thus far. The interaction reminded him of a time gone by,when he was barely twelve years old. He and his father had gone into a cafe and overheard the owner talking about 7/7. When he saw the two of them enter, he shushed his conversation partner, and served them coldly and methodically. The air had been pregnant with the tense words that had come before, and the jovial attitude that subsequent patrons were given was absent from the interaction. It was that same distrust all over again, packaged this time in an older, female body.

Safiya rolled down the window and called, "We haven't even done anything to you!"

"Yet," Marcus added under his breath. They chuckled again at the implications of it, the importance it made them feel, however insubstantial it was.

The woman continued to glare as she reached the curb. Zayn continued to think about discouraging moments with his dad. He missed him.

"Why are you so serious right now, Zain?" asked Tariq. 

Zayn found Tariq's eyes reflected in the viewfinder. He felt mild panic at being singled out when he was reflecting on personal, Zayn-like, thoughts. He made a mental note to stop doing that in their company if he wanted to continue to pull off this performance. 

"I was just thinking about how she'll be sorry," he answered, smoothly transitioning back to being Zain. "They'll all be sorry."

"How?" Marcus asked. 

Zayn shrugged. "We're going to ruin this Christmas. If we pull this off people will be too upset to celebrate this year. They'll be too obsessed with splashing our pictures on the news and trying to figure out where it all went wrong." 

Tariq laughed. "It all went wrong the minute we were born for a ton of them."

"But I mean, what we do fucks them up longer than we think."

Then the words exited Zayn’s mouth before he could erase them from his thoughts.

"I knew this lad whose mum was killed on 7/7 and he freaked out. He was, like, 'I used to worry about her all the time as a kid. Maybe I knew how it was going to end?'" Zayn recited Harry's words and mimicked the way his voice tightened as he nearly lost control. "He went absolutely mental trying to join the police, or maybe it was MI-5, like he was going to avenge her death. I don't know what happened to him but he left school after that."

"D'you think he did it? I mean, is he a cop now or something?" Tariq asked.

"Definitely not. Not if he was as smart as his idiot mum who thought she was going to be a model. That's why she died. She was trying to get modeling work."

"Was she beautiful or something?" Safiya asked.

Zayn's heart was already breaking before he said the words. "If she looked anything like him they might have considered her for ‘Before’ shots in plastic surgery adverts."

He offered a throaty gasp, that sounded halfway between a cough and a dry heave to his ears, as an amicable chuckle. Their laughter was loud enough to drown out his lack of enthusiasm. Zayn half-expected to hear Harry's slow drawl promising to murder him but he heard nothing. He wasn't sure if he should find the silence comforting. 

"But that's what I mean," he said, doubling back to his point, to Zain's point. "What we do fucks their lives up forever. It changes everything and we'll be the cause of it."

"I'm getting goose bumps," Safiya said, while Marcus and Tariq voiced similar sentiments. 

It was retread of what he had said in his posts, essays and conversations with them, but it came with a concrete example of the possible aftermath to back it up, even if it came at Harry's expense. The guilt was almost too heavy to bear, but he pushed it away to listen to Tariq's updates on their plan. He had secured the materials for their bombs, products he had access to because of his job, and was working together with Safiya to put them together in time for their attack. 

Marcus told them, that based on hours of research he'd conducted, the stores were busiest around closing time, so they should plan to be ready to detonate an hour before closing. They still disagreed on which department stores to hit and whether or not they should all target the same one together.

"Why would you want to stay together?" Zayn asked. "We could hit more places if we split up." He didn't tell them that it would also make it easier for him to not follow through with any of their plans if he wasn't being watched, easier for him to help apprehend the other three if their eyes weren't fixed on him, waiting for him to detonate his bomb. 

"What if something goes wrong," Tariq started. "Then one of us would be there to help out." 

"We go out together," Safiya added. "It's less lonely than doing it by ourselves, don't you think? Tariq's right too, like, what if everyone's goes off but mine doesn't?"

"Maybe it's better if one of you lived to tell the tale?" Zayn suggested. 

Safiya turned around and looked at him as though he had grown three extra heads. "Are you batshit? I couldn’t live without my brother."

It was funny to him, how people who planned to murder a bunch of strangers could have strong familial bonds, could feel anything. They weren't the cold-blooded psychopaths that they would be painted out to be in the media. They lived in the foggiest part of the grey area that everyone else lived in. 

Marcus and Tariq began to argue again about what stores should be on the list, while Safiya reached her hand behind her seat and found Zayn's leg. She stroked it lightly, up and down over the back of his calf, as much as the awkward positioning would allow. He leaned toward the back of her chair, forehead pressed into the back of the headrest, and wrapped an arm around her waist. 

Like everything else he did with the Masoods and Marcus, it was mimicry, but the wave to her hair was so similar to Harry's that for a moment he was transported to a daydream where it was Harry's waist he held. He released her when thoughts of Harry's reaction to his words got to be too much. She cooed sadly at his withdrawal.

"I'll take you home," Tariq told him.

"You don't have to. I'm actually close enough, I can walk from here," Zayn said. His voice betrayed him and rose a pitch too high on the last word. 

"No, no it's fine, what's the address?"

His eyebrows rose together like twin slopes. He couldn't tell them to take him to the flats. They were unmarked, so they wouldn't cause too much suspicion but taking them too close to home, to the real him, was unthinkable. He almost gave them his Bradford address in desperation to say anything when he heard Harry’s low, slow rumble in his ear.

"You live at..." Harry told him cross streets Zayn had never heard before. He repeated them to Tariq, who nodded and turned the car down a block. Zayn held his tongue, wanting to say "Thank you," to say anything that might start the apology. 

The building turned out to be a medium sized apartment complex, swirled with graffiti as high as arms could reach. He almost didn't get out in time until Tariq impatiently said, "Zain, we're here."

"Oh, right," Zayn answered. He said a few goodbyes and they reminded him of the next time they planned to meet, a few days later. He approached the apartment door tentatively. 

He chanced a glance backward and saw that Tariq was waiting outside, presumably for him to enter safely. 

“Shit,” Zayn said under his breath. He shoved his hand through his jacket pocket, miming the action of searching for his keys. There was only so long he could grab at the nothingness in his pocket before they would become suspicious. 

They were still outside waiting. Zayn smiled and shook his head then shoved his hand back inside of his pocket in the mimed search, acting as though he was doggedly searching every crevice of his jacket, every fashionable pocket and all the functional ones.

“Just push the door,” Harry’s voice came through the wire again, cracking on the last word. Zayn’s fears of facing him again grew exponentially.

Sure enough when Zayn pushed the door, it opened with ease. He waved at Tariq’s car before walking inside and heading up the stairs, waiting in the second floor hallway for further instruction. He heard a baby’s cries in the distance while he contemplated a thick cloud of fry up smells coming from the apartment to his left. 

**Sixteen**  
Harry pulled up to the apartment complex ten minutes later to pick him up. His beanie was pulled down over his forehead and he sat with his eyes focused on his lap.

"You can't be asleep again?" Zayn nervously teased. 

At his words, Harry looked up toward the road ahead and wordlessly began to drive them back toward their flats. They had scarcely driven down two streets when Zayn grew too antsy to wait for a reaction from Harry. 

"You know that bit about your mum, that was all bullshit, yeah?”

Harry answered with dead silence.

“Are you going to say anything?" 

"No, I'm thinking," Harry said in that slow drawl. 

"About what?"

Harry didn’t answer him. 

“I don’t actually mean any of what I said. It was just a lie, like everything else I tell them,” Zayn explained. 

“I thought we...” He stopped and started again. “I thought Simon said, ‘The best lies start as truth.’” Harry recited Simon’s words with as much feeling as a robot.

“Not this one!” Zayn protested. He felt the precarious bond they had forged coming undone like a sweater whose rogue thread snagged itself on a sharp edge. “This one was complete shit.”

He fervently wished for more than the yellow flashes of light from the street lamps to illuminate Harry’s face. He needed to see what he was up against, anger or sadness, to know how he should approach this, and how to fix it. All he got was the quiet and the trading flashes of headlights and street lamps. 

Harry called into Simon when they neared Zayn’s flat. Simon congratulated Harry’s quick thinking on the apartment complex. Apparently it was one that clandestine operatives used regularly as a home base because of its lax locking system. He mercifully avoided mentioning any of the business with Harry’s mother. Whether it was tacit acceptance of his actions, Zayn was not sure. 

Zayn wondered if it was possible to suffocate from guilt. 

**Seventeen**  
When it was time for Zayn to get picked up for the next meeting the same black car picked him up, but it wasn’t Harry in the driver’s seat. 

“Harry’s ill with some digestive issue or other, so they sent me instead,” the driver said, affably, when he noticed Zayn’s puzzled expression. Zayn didn’t believe a word of it but went along with it. The boy introduced himself as Nathan and part of the same division that Harry was in. He had a passing resemblance to a wall-eyed cartoon character.

After the meeting ended, Marcus, Tariq and Safiya narrowed down their list of department stores—Liberty, Harrods and Selfridges—in Safiya’s car this time. They discussed the pros and cons of splitting up, targeting each store alone while two of them tackled one together. They debated taking one store down together, Marcus’ preferred choice, because the blasts coming from all four of them would level any building. Zayn was a passive participant, only offering noncommittal responses when pressed. He took it all in, when he wasn’t wondering what Harry was doing, how he was doing.

Nathan picked Zayn up from the same apartment complex that Safiya insisted on driving him back to. They debriefed with Simon quickly, then rode back most of the way making polite, though empty, conversation.

“Hey, do you all live in the same building like us newer recruits do?” Zayn asked. “I want to see how Harry’s doing and if it’s on your way home then…”

Nathan shook his head. “No, they’ve moved us all over the city. Helps us watch the agents we’re assigned to better. Keeps us more discrete.”

“Oh,” he said. 

“But he lives near you. I could take you there,” Nathan went on. 

“Yeah, take me there,” Zayn told him.

**Eighteen**  
Harry greeted him at the door, in a red hoodie pulled over his head, tufts of curls escaping from the top and sides. Zayn wasn't shocked that he didn't look sick, of course it had been a lie, but he did appear more sullen and younger than he had ever seen him.

"Feeling better?" he teased, but the words sounded stupid and useless.

"No," Harry answered simply. He moved to disappear behind the door again.

"I'm sorry I fucked up," Zayn said, words rushing out of him like air from a deflating balloon. "I used your story but I don't really see you like that. I'm so fucking sorry. I can't guarantee I won't fuck up again, but I need you to help me with this. I can't do this without your help." 

The despair in his words mortified him but he didn't double back on them, or try to pull away some of the melodrama on their surface. He plainly gazed at Harry and ignored the sick feeling of being this stripped bare.

Harry stood aside from the door frame, his hands still crossed against his chest, with that serious look on his face. He didn't meet Zayn's eyes and stared intently at the floor. Zayn couldn't stand it, couldn't stand any of it so he risked it.

He flitted his fingertips against Harry's face, tracing a line from his jaw to the tip of his nose. It was a throwaway contact but he did it like he was trying to erase a bit of the furrow from Harry's brow, some of the harsh line of his mouth. Harry's lips quirked and Zayn's followed in suit. 

He didn't know how it happened, but sure enough the graveness melted from both of their faces, and they were left smiling at each other. 

"Do you want to come in?"

"Uh, sure," Zayn said.

He walked through the space that Harry's body left in the frame and entered. The flat was modestly decorated, certainly better than the tasteless interior design of his own flat. The furniture was lovingly culled from charity shops but somehow its contrary patterns and textures were harmonious. The walls bore posters of bands that Zayn vaguely recalled other students talking about in his art history classes. A framed black and white photo of a banana was stationed on a wall behind the couch.

"What's with you and bananas?" Zayn asked. He pointed at the picture when Harry gave him a questioning look. 

Harry shrugged. "I think they're funny." He flopped down on the couch and grabbed the controller that had been tossed to the side. The game resumed, sounds of gunshots and bullets hitting their targets filling the air. Zayn took the other end of the couch, shocked by how comfortable it felt against his bones. 

"Sorry. You want to play?" Harry paused it.

"Yeah." 

Harry got up his end of the couch and pulled another controller out of the maze of wires on his floor, fiddled around with attachments and a few buttons to set it up. They played for a while, their companionable silence interrupted by intermittent sounds of cartridges being emptied into virtual bodies. 

Zayn paused his player. "Where's your bathroom?"

"In my bedroom," he answered, eyes glued to the television and the four targets he was finishing off.

Zayn walked into the bedroom after fiddling around on the wall to find the light switch. Harry's bedroom was outfitted similarly to the rest of the flat, a few aesthetically interesting posters on the wall, the same mismatched yet congruous kind of furnishings. The only difference was the presence of an imposing bed with tangled sheets and upturned pillows. Across from it was a bare Christmas tree. A small box lay under it. It initially seemed like an as yet unwrapped gift but when Zayn toed at it with his shoe, one flap opened to reveal glittering ornaments.

"Why haven't you decorated your tree yet?" Zayn asked, when he had finished using the bathroom, poking his head out into the living room.

"I didn't have time?" Harry said, like he wasn't sure himself. 

"Get up," Zayn told him, beckoning him to the bedroom.

"We have four days until Christmas. You're decorating your tree," he said when Harry didn't immediately move. He tried to ignore the way his heart thudded in his chest at the excitement in Harry's face, the delight of his dimples. 

Harry spilled the box of ornaments, the sparkly, twinkling contents thudding and jangling to the floor. There were the requisite brightly colored balls, a few nutcrackers and rocking horses but there were also the ornaments that held stories within them, ornaments that added a family's character to the tree. They were disarticulated figurines, shoddily painted like the fruits of a primary school art project. Zayn picked up a pair of red balls and affixed one to the shell of each ear. Harry nodded his approval and stuck the star in his hair, using one hand to hold it in place while he used the other to dig through the pile. 

He sat on the floor, handing off ornaments to Zayn to place higher up on the tree, while he decorated the lower half. Zayn hummed an amalgam of Deck the Halls and Jingle Bells, realizing too late that he had mixed songs. Harry sung along to his humming, easily switching between the lyrics. They talked about their tree decorating traditions--Zayn's family always placed the star atop the tree first and then worked from the top to the bottom while Harry and his sister had carried on the tradition of hanging an ornament that depicted their hopes for the new year, after his had mother died. A question about why Harry hadn't decorated the tree with his sister this year hung between them unanswered, and Zayn didn't pry any further. While he draped the Christmas lights around the tree, Harry plugged them in. It looked near-perfect, given its haphazard execution. 

Zayn stretched out his hand to take a picture of them in front of the tree. Once the purple spots in their eyes from the blinding flash had quelled, they inspected it. His smile was the most genuine one he had smiled in months and it showed. Its undeterred joy was mirrored in Harry's own smile.

"I like that," Harry said, as Zayn tapped out of the photo reel on his phone. He pointed to the microphone where the shirt had exposed his forearm. 

"Thanks." Zayn stroked the microphone absently. "Have you got any?" 

"Yeah, here." Harry pulled out the sides of his top, revealing twin birds under his collarbones. 

Zayn examined the craftsmanship; they were expertly done, perfect copies of each other. "Love them," he said. 

Harry looked proud. "We should get some together, you know, like, after this."

"We should," Zayn said like a pledge.

Harry walked over to the light switch and turned it off, then settled onto the floor. Zayn followed his lead, pulling up next to him. The tree glowed like an ethereal being out of one of Zayn's comic books. He was so taken by the tree's beauty that he didn't notice Harry's head on his shoulder until an errant lock of hair tickled his chin. 

They sat in the quiet, enveloping glow, before Zayn had to leave. 

 

**Nineteen**

The last newsletter meeting ended in a changing of the guard. Tariq, citing increased demands in his work schedule, appointed a new editor-in-chief. The writer, a bookish man Zayn had seen watching Tariq with reverence at all the meetings, was shocked but thrilled for the promotion. Zayn clapped along with everyone at the announcement, trying to affect thinly concealed jealousy that Safiya had urged them to demonstrate. They had decided that Tariq’s passing them over might seem too curious. If they all seemed upset, it would look less like they had major plans and more like Tariq was merely stepping down as he suggested.

In Safiya’s car, they made their final arrangements. They would meet one more time just after three in the afternoon, when they would decide once and for all if they would go it alone or forge ahead together. Tariq would dole out the bombs and they would record a message like so many bombers had in the past. Then they would move on to their designated places and the rest would play out and replay on countless news stations all over the world, narrated by stunned reporters.

All the while, Zayn covertly fiddled with the wire. He had placed it poorly again and every few minutes he felt it slide and pop out of his ear canal, falling into the concha. He stayed in the shadowed parts of the car, ring finger and pinkie pressed to his temple, feigning a headache while his index finger and thumb tried to work the wire into place.

Safiya dropped off Marcus first. She was heading toward Zain's flat but Tariq asked to be dropped off at the university.

“I want to check up on something in the lab before I go home,” he told her. “Make sure we got everything.”

“How long will this take?” she asked, when they rolled to a stop in front of the university’s buildings, marked 'Biological Sciences' in wrought iron. 

“Maybe an hour or two? I don’t know. I’ll see you later. Bye, Zain.” Tariq got out and slammed the door. 

“You want to sit up here?” Safiya asked, inclining her head to the newly vacated passenger seat.

Zayn climbed between the front seats and plopped down next to her while she put the car in drive again. The act made the wire pop out again and he again tried to put it back in. The ride was mostly silent. 

“I’m excited for tomorrow,” she said. 

“Me too,” he said, distractedly.

“Do you have a migraine or something?” 

“Uh, kinda,” Zayn told her, still fiddling to get the wire inside. It was nearly in, he just needed one, more—and it was in.

Safiya cut the engine at their destination, approaching Zain’s building from the back this time. A few cars were parked in the lonely square that made up the building’s parking lot. “Gentrify this” was written in boxy lettering inside of the outline of a cock on the side of apartment building.

“So,” she said. She bit the left edge of her lip.

“See you tomorrow,” he said, reaching for the door.

“Really?”

He paused, saw her let her bottom lip slide out from under her front teeth.

“Zain, we’re dying tomorrow. Like, we won’t be around anymore. Tonight’s the last night to enjoy the best parts of this shitty existence and you’re not even going to ask me up? How much longer do I need to flirt with you?” she asked. 

He made a series of false starts, ready to tell her something that he had lead her on, he was married, he was gay, anything to get out of it. A particular swing of his jaw and the wire had popped again. Zayn’s hand immediately went to his ear. 

“The world’s ending tomorrow,” she said, putting only an inch in between their faces. “I’ve got on my sluttiest underwear and I am waiting for you to invite me upstairs so you can see it.”

“I—“ he said, lifting his hand to his ear.

She ducked her face to see his ear. “Seriously, what’s wrong with your ear? What is th—“ 

He cut her off with a kiss. Her lips parted easily under his. Once they had established an easy rhythm he rolled the wire out of his ear, intent on slipping it into his jacket. Her hands were all over his body, trying to get under his jacket, under the belt of his jeans. 

But his fingers snagged on his a folded seam and the wire tumbled down somewhere between the door and the edge of the seat, and like that, Zayn saw the night become tragic.

Safiya unbuckled her seatbelt, climbed onto his lap, legs straddled over him. She worked herself out of her peacoat, threw it over to the back of the car before she pressed back into him. It kept escalating, bits of her outer clothing shed while she guided his hands under her shirt and inside of her jeans, Zayn unable to believe how far this was going. When she finally threw off her shirt, he helped her toss it to where he’d lost the wire. It would be an excuse to go looking there, after. 

She bucked against his fingers as they found the right spot. She was so wet that it wouldn’t be long anyway and he was hard despite himself. He worked her for a bit, half-heartedly kissing her breasts and sneaking side long glances at the crack between the door and seat.

When she came she said a different name, calling out to someone who wasn’t there. Zayn thought the feeling was mutual.

 

**Twenty**  
“Did you have fun?” Harry asked when Zayn entered the car. 

“You know you should’ve just gone on with it,” he added. “You’ve had a tough go of it. Simon probably wouldn’t have minded if you fucked her.”

Harry was joking, but the easiness with which he passed Zayn off to another person stung him. All those fantasies he had entertained, of them being anything more than just co-workers barely tolerating one another, solidified themselves as just fantasies.

“You smell like her,” Harry noted. He grinned, though the top half of his face was scrunched up with some other emotion that Zayn couldn’t figure out.

“Fuck you,” he said.

He pulled the wire from his pocket, opened the glove compartment and replaced it in its holder. Retrieving it had been more trouble than it was worth but the alternative was too risky. Helping her find the contents of her ensemble had provided ample time for him to rummage around the car’s floor and find it.

“So that’s it, right?” Zayn asked when Harry had called into Simon again. “I’m done. You guys have all the evidence you need.”

“Not quite.”

Zayn’s heart plummeted. “What?”

“We have this recorded chatter we’ve gotten through your wire but it would be better if we had an actual attempt. One we’ll thwart, of course.”

“But the Terrorism Acts, you can arrest them right now? You can deport them! Why does this have to go any further?” Zayn was leaning so far forward at the radio, pleading his case, that Harry had to gently push his shoulder back to set him upright again. 

“I’m aware, but with countless arrests ending in dropped charges, not to mention the international incident this will cause with the States. We’re finding it increasingly hard to even invoke it these days and the public isn’t liking the direction—” 

“Who the fuck cares who likes it or not!” Zayn interrupted. “If you can arrest them now why are you making me put my life on the line for this?”

“Zayn,” Harry said, imparting an unbearable amount of tranquility into his name. 

Simon paused before continuing. “You’ll be wearing your wire tomorrow. We’ll all be listening and watching you. As soon as we find out where they intend to go, we’ll be awaiting them and apprehend them. Then you’re free to go home for the holidays.”

He relayed the plan like it was the most monotonous proceeding to occur, like Zayn was merely staying late to finish up a presentation on how some company could halve its monthly expenditures. Instead this was potentially lethal.

“If something goes wrong--” Zayn started. 

“Nothing’ll go wrong,” Harry said, keyed into Zayn’s agitation. 

“Harry’s right. Now get a good night’s sleep and I will see you both tomorrow,” Simon said. 

Zayn closed his eyes and leaned against the passenger side window. Whether it was from the way that tomorrow could play out, or from her scent lingering on his hand, he felt the sickness rising again.

“Harry?” he asked. 

“Yeah.” Harry pulled over to the of the road, slowing in time for the passenger side door to stop in the space between two parked cars. A frustrated driver honked behind them.

Zayn opened the door and leaned out in time for a stream of chunky beige vomit to eject from his mouth and arch into the street. He shuddered again and his mouth was producing yet another spray. The sight of it, the half-digested food from Bahaar painting the asphalt, brought on another wave of sickness until he was dry heaving. More horns blared and Zayn quickly shut the door and slumped back in his chair.

“You okay?” Harry asked. He didn’t immediately drive off despite the increasing cacophony of the other cars, urging them to move on.

“No,” Zayn said over a horn’s angry refrain belting from the car directly behind them. “Not at all.”

“I’m coming home with you,” Harry told him with finality. 

Zayn closed his eyes in answer. Underneath his eyelids he saw visions of all the ways tomorrow could play out unfavorably like nightmares.

**Twenty-One**

It was always odd to introduce someone to an environment that was not their designated milieu. It is a nagging feeling that pervades the senses, insisting that this is a stranger and they are not meant to be here. It was no different when he opened the door to his flat with Harry in tow. He glanced around, mildly annoyed with himself for not straightening up a little before he left. A dirty plate decorated the coffee table and a load of laundry was thrown haphazardly over the couch. Otherwise, over the two years he had lived here, it had become home, and he cautiously presented it with an equal mix of pride and terror, like a sketch of one of his comic characters.

Unable to take the warring feelings, he said, “I’m going to go get cleaned up, but you can make yourself at home.”

He took a quick shower, more of an extended rinse than a deep cleaning, but it was enough to wash away the hints of earlier parts of the night. He brushed his teeth and threw on a pair of sweatpants, left his upper body bare. He figured that he would be collapsing in bed soon enough, regardless of Harry's presence.

Harry looked around the flat, taking it all in. He lingered by his display of vintage comic books, then by his computer that played an endless slideshow of pictures of Zayn and his family. As one picture floated beyond the borders of the monitor, another entered from the opposite side. Zayn loved this part of the slideshow, where the photo of his sisters and mother, caught mid-laugh at some long-forgotten joke, appeared.

“They’re beautiful,” Harry said.

“Thanks.”

The bit of distraction that showing his flat provided quickly dissipated at the pretty smiles on all of the faces, at the prospect of a Christmas Eve that might go wrong and prevent him from ever seeing their faces again.

“Fuck,” Zayn said, blankly looking ahead.

The plaintive sound to the word seemed to tip Harry off to his declining emotional state, because he spun back around, shaking a baggie. Zayn’s eyes strained to see the contents, then realized the small, green clusters were weed.

“We’re allowed to do that?” 

Harry shrugged. “They’ve never stopped me from doing it. We’re not out on a mission right now and you need it to chill out.” 

He produced a bowl and a lighter from his pocket, sat on the couch as he started to pack the bowl. Zayn watched him from across the room, then looked toward his kitchen. 

“Can I, uh, get you anything to drink?” Zayn asked, remembering his manners. 

Harry looked up from his hands and shook his head. He held out the bowl, a swirled green and black affair, and the lighter. 

Zayn walked over and took it from his hands. He sat next to Harry, flicked his thumb over the lighter wheel until the yellow-red flame shot out, and brought the bowl to his pursed lips. The weed glowed pink and red as he inhaled. 

Harry watched him intently, lips slightly parted, eyelids hooding as he focused on the bowl.

Zayn handed off the lighter and then the bowl once he removed it from his lips. As he let the smoke slip through his lips in a slow controlled stream, he watched Harry’s own lips bracket the bowl, his cheeks slightly hollowing in anticipation, as he lowered the lighter. They passed it back and forth, and with each turn, the rational parts of his subconscious lost a little bit more jurisdiction over his thoughts and body.

Harry finally got up, went over to the kitchenette to empty the ash, while Zayn let his head roll back onto the back edge of the couch. 

“It’s quiet in here,” he mumbled to himself. He went to his computer and played the first song that came up on a playlist he’d created months ago. It was mercifully mellow, a song with notes that felt like waves of water lapping at his appendages.

When Zayn returned to the couch, Harry was lying on it, head cradled in the basket of his arms and hands. His long, slender body took up the entirety of its length, so Zayn sat on the floor, back against it. Harry’s fingers found his hair, cutting pathways in his scalp. He relaxed into Harry’s fingers, wondering why they hadn’t done this earlier. 

Languid-moving threads of reasoning came back to him then. They hadn’t done this earlier because their relationship wasn’t a normal one. They weren’t put together because of some serendipitous occasion, an amorous alignment of the stars and moon. They had been consciously placed into one another’s orbit by Simon and other nameless officials who needed them to do a dangerous job. As he continued to sit, the gravity of the situation chased away some of the sweet buzz he had ravenously taken into his system. 

“Harry?”

He grunted a response.

Zayn struggled to put together a sentence that accurately captured the tangled emotions in his head. "They've already been getting suspicious of me." 

He got up from the floor, struck with a horrifying thought. The effects of the weed stilled, replaced by a sobering needle of fear.

"What if I die tomorrow?" Zayn said aloud, finally allowing the idea to sink into his head. The holidays with his family seemed like another life, never to be experienced again. “What if something goes wrong and I end up as one more name on a list of missing people?”

Harry didn’t say anything, though he nodded once. 

"I could die tomorrow. I could end up killing people and myself tomorrow," Zayn said. He tried to take a deep breath, but his lungs felt powerless, unable to pull in air. 

His vision became cloudy. He would not cry, he would not cry. He hadn't cried in front of another person since his preteens, when a group of boys had attacked him after school, punched and kicked him on his way home. He had openly sobbed in front of his mother as she cleaned up a particularly nasty wound on his palm, an injury created by the way he grabbed onto ground, balled into himself, trying to protect himself from the attacker's blows. It had been humiliating, bawling seemingly without end, but at least it had been with someone who had known him all his life. 

"Zayn," Harry said. 

Zayn could feel him come around, putting his arm around his shoulders, enveloping him in a hug. Zayn curled his arm around Harry's waist in response.

“Are you just realizing this now?” Harry asked, shuddering.

“What?”

“That you could die. Like it only occurred to you now? Not all those other times you’ve been doing this?” Harry shuddered again.

Zayn pulled away first, searching Harry’s face for signs of tears. Harry’s eyes were dry, but he was shuddering again as his lips broke apart over a laugh.

“I’m sorry, I just—“ Harry started, dissolving into laughter again.

“Haz, what the fuck, this is serious,” Zayn said, though he, too, felt a hysterical laugh bubbling up from his chest.

“I know, I know, I know. It’s the weed. But, Zayn, you’re only scared now?” Harry was off in a fit of giggles again and Zayn followed, belly laughs that rolled out of him uncontrollably. They both gasped for air, each other’s laughter starting another tremor in the other, making it harder to stop. 

The hysterics made tears, borne of the laughter and all his anxiety, spring into Zayn’s eyes, blurring his vision. He swiped the back of his palms at the wetness clinging to his lashes. Harry's eyes mirrored his own, though they twinkled with something more than tears engendered by this dark comedy. In them, Zayn saw a chance that maybe everything wasn't so one-sided.

Zayn crashed his mouth into Harry's, half-expecting to be thrown back immediately, perhaps punched. But it didn't stop the desperation in the kiss, the way Zayn enclosed Harry's cheeks between his tear-damp hands, and pressed everything that had been boiling underneath the surface into this kiss. 

The oddest thing happened. Harry kissed him back. 

Warm, soft lips pressed back against him, established a rhythm of pressing, then retreating with short excursions of his tongue. Harry gave back as good as he got, licking the center of Zayn's lips before allowing his tongue to flick over Zayn's.

The low growl in the back of Harry’s throat made Zayn grab at fistfuls of his shirt, yanking frantically without discernible purpose. 

Harry pulled away from him at the end of a deep kiss and turned toward the television. He picked up one of the blankets from Zayn’s bed and draped it around the televsion. He went to the alarm clock next, unplugged it, and retrieved a flash disk from a chamber within. 

"Cameras," he told Zayn as he went to the bed. He climbed onto it and angled his arms toward the ceiling fan.

"Right. Cameras."

"We have to keep you safe," Harry explained as he fiddled with a switch on the ceiling fan. “There were a few times, when I dropped you off, that you’d had a thousand yard stare. They wanted me to make sure you weren’t losing it.”

"So you've seen me...?" Zayn couldn't ask, only growing more mortified that he had given into urges on a few of the lonelier nights in the flat, bringing himself off to thoughts of Harry's lips.

Harry jumped down from the bed once he had finished messing with the fan. 

"Yeah," he said, smirking. "When you were in the shower, too."

Zayn immediately wished for a hole to open up in the room and swallow him, so he wouldn't need to endure the embarrassment anymore. 

"Well, at least if it all goes to shit tomorrow, this won't be so embarrassing," he mused. 

"Don't say that," Harry told him, the teasing upturn of his lips falling immediately.

Harry closed the distance between them with two strides and was kissing Zayn again like he was swearing an oath to him. Zayn responded, his mouth opening in sweet defeat. He ran his hands underneath the hem of Harry's shirt, tracing trails with the pads of his fingers. He wanted to follow those trails with his lips. When the trails raised high enough and the shirt bunched at Zayn's wrists, he broke away from Harry's lips and pulled the shirt over his head. Harry's hair fluffed over the collar before flopping back down again in its artful disarray. 

Zayn's hands traveled over Harry's back and up the sides of his torso in earnest. He started to shudder again, this time overwhelmed by the sensation. 

As he pushed him back onto the edge of the bed, Zayn asked, “Harry?”, gathering the courage to admit a truth that might stop this train in its tracks.

Harry looked in Zayn's eyes before he dropped his to Zayn's stomach. He wetted his lips, pushed the edge of the button down shirt up toward Zayn’s heart and licked a broad stripe from the top of his jeans upwards. 

"What?" he asked into Zayn’s skin. 

"This…" Zayn said, not offering anything more, nearly losing himself in the ministrations of Harry's tongue. 

"You haven't done this before?" he asked before licking another parallel stripe. To punctuate it, Harry nipped at the skin on top with his teeth.

"With girls, yeah, but lads I...uh I've messed around but never, like, not...fully..." Zayn admitted, suddenly shy, and hating himself for the lack of experience. 

Harry said, "We don't have to do that tonight. Not yet." 

Zayn nodded. He wasn't sure how many new things he could get himself to do tonight. He was already maxed to the limit with everything else, as much as he wanted to do every single thing he may never get a chance to, he feared it would overwhelm him.

"Even though we should.” His words were teasing him, the movements of his lips mouthing the hardness in Zayn’s jeans. “We really should.”

Zayn made an incomprehensible noise that he hoped sounded like agreement. 

Harry cupped Zayn through his jeans once before his fingers undid the top button, slid the zipper down to its snagged area. He hooked his fingers underneath the top of Zayn’s jeans and boxer briefs, and slid them down his hips, just over his ass. The band snagged his cock before it finally pushed over to his thighs. 

Harry grasped him in hand, straightening the angle from where his cock arched back slightly towards his torso. He gave two short strokes, wrists flicking at the top of a movement that had Zayn panting in anticipation of Harry’s next moves. But Harry leaned his face too far to the right, licking up the ridge of Zayn’s hipbone, then mirroring the action on the other side, all the while continuing to jerk him. Zayn moved his hips eagerly, trying to get himself into closer proximity to Harry’s elusive mouth. 

Then, like Zayn had watched him do so many times before, Harry parted his lips, and gracelessly stuck out his tongue. But unlike those times before, Harry lapped at the head of Zayn’s cock, once, twice, spreading a bit of the moisture that had gathered at the tip.   
Harry leaned back for a moment, one hand still jerking Zayn with excruciatingly slow strokes. He felt like he was dying a very slow death, but Harry only continued to tease him, avoiding longer contact. He smiled up at Zayn, nearly gloating at the way he was a moment from begging. It unraveled something in Zayn.

One hand went to his cock, the other to a fistful of Harry's hair, grabbing him a bit more roughly than he intended, and Zayn pushed Harry's face to his dick until its tip nearly rested on his bottom lip. Harry teased, flicking his tongue over his lip where Zayn's cock lay, sending fleeting sparks of sensation into Zayn's groin. Harry stared at him, but gave up the farce, letting his mouth open so that Zayn could push into the wet heat unhindered. He didn't break eye contact until Zayn had pushed deeply into his mouth, his body giving a tiny shudder from the gag. Then Harry's gaze fell, his hand relieving Zayn's from its duties at the base of his cock, and he began to suck and lick, fist moving in rhythm with his mouth. 

Zayn watched him at first, hands raking through his hair to keep it away from where it occluded the view. Harry was enthusiastic, taking in as much as he could, even as Zayn fucked into his mouth harder and deeper. Harry made intermittent gagging noises when Zayn went too far, that came more frequently as he was nearing his peak. 

Harry pulled off him to slide his tongue from Zayn's sack to his tip and back down again. As his lips closed over his cock again, Zayn knew it was a matter of moments. He pulled the hair near Harry's nape, forcing his head to tilt up. Zayn had to see the look in Harry's eyes as he came. Harry’s hair fell over his eyes, so all Zayn could see were the bottom of his nose and the way his lips stretched over him, sliding over his cock. Then his body was springing tightly, every muscle in him contracting for the final release.

“Oh fuuuck,” Zayn hissed as his body snapped and jerked. Harry sucked him through the wave, then moved away to jerk the last moisture out of him. The cum seeped over Harry's knuckles. 

Zayn slumped against him, satiated and spent. He let Harry lead him to the side of the bed, help him all but collapse on the bed. Harry kissed his neck and shoulders, his hands moving over his own erection. It pressed at a sharp angle against his jeans, tenting out the tiny bit of extra fabric that it spared. 

Zayn turned to him with the silly, blissed-out smile that always accompanied his orgasms. 

“I...you...” He started but Harry covered his lips with a needy kiss. Zayn fell back against the bed and Harry kissed him harshly into it, pushing his head deeply into the mattress. Harry briefly pulled away from Zayn to shed his shoes and jeans. He wore nothing underneath them, a fact that didn't surprise Zayn.

He palmed his cock, hungrily watching as Zayn kicked off his sweatpants. 

“Where...?” Harry asked, looking around the room as he stroked himself.

“Under the bed,” Zayn said, knowing the rest of the question without needing it expressly stated. Harry kneeled down and retrieved the items he sought, a pack of condoms and a half-full bottle of lube. He set the condoms aside on the bed, flipped the lube open and coated his index and middle finger. He threw down the lube next to Zayn, then laid down again, curling one of his fingers after slowly pushing it inside of himself. Shifting slightly, Harry moved his finger in and out, around, for a few minutes, before inserting a second.

Zayn stared, enthralled by the show of it, the way Harry's right eye squinted when he added another finger, the way his cheeks were flushed. He was hard again, his hand finding itself on his cock, touching himself carefully to make it last. It would be too embarrassing to come at the sight of this alone. He detached a condom from the pack, rolled it onto himself as Harry inserted a third finger.

“Now,” Harry said, removing his fingers and beckoning Zayn. He took the lube into his hands again, dispensed a generous amount over Zayn's cock and spread it all over with a few jerks.

Zayn anchored himself above him on one arm, while he used the other to guide himself to Harry's entrance. Harry's legs were crumpled against his chest, bracketing Zayn's body. He pushed into him slowly, fully seating himself after what felt like an agonizing amount of time. Withdrawing, Zayn pushed forward again, garnering an appreciative moan from Harry's lips. He fucked into him, picking up a rhythm this time, his grunts mixing with Harry's low groans. 

“Wait, wait,” Harry panted. Zayn withdrew, so Harry could flip himself over onto his hands and knees, then grasped his hips, pulling him back onto his cock as he thrust in. The angle wrought more moaning and panting from both of them, and in a more lucid moment Zayn wondered if he should tell him to be quiet. Harry's hand went to his cock, eliciting an internal tightening, and Zayn was lost to any sense of decorum.

Harry’s ass bloomed rosily where Zayn’s skin slapped against his. Harry's right arm picked up speed as he brought himself closer to the brink. He came on a broken curse, moans heaving out of him. 

Zayn hoped that if he had to die soon, he could die like this. Then he tumbled off the precipice.

**Twenty-Two**

"This isn't how I expected to celebrate Christmas Eve's...Eve," Zayn said, feeling stupid as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He hadn’t expected anything from the last two years certainly nothing that left him, naked and sticky, in bed with his shadower, hours from the very real possibility of death. 

He held Harry’s back against his chest, his own supported by the cold wall. Harry lazily trailed his fingers over Zayn's arm, where it rested against his torso, tracing the outline of “ZAP” and all of the shading of the microphone. Zayn concentrated on matching the rise and fall of their chests.

“This is a good melody,” Harry said.

It took Zayn a minute to realize he was talking about the music still drifting toward the bed from the computer. He bobbed his head, a half-beat away from being in time with the bass. The same song had played while they were smoking earlier and Zayn concluded that he had hit the repeat button. It was a small victory that the album had been one of his favorites.

“Yeah, this song. It’s massive,” he replied.

The lyrics were woozy, cocaine-dusted metaphors about sex set to a lascivious bass beat. An erotic electric guitar riff mimicked coital cries, swooping in and out to punctuate particular lines. 

Zayn coaxed Harry off his chest, pushed him down, back onto the bed. Then he flipped himself in order to straddle him. He kissed down Harry’s neck and chest during the pauses between lyrics that he mouthed against his pale flesh. He lingered at his nipples, tonguing them into hard points. At an instrumental break, Zayn pulled all of Harry in his mouth, bobbing his head, sliding his lips and tongue up and down, to the same rhythm the song had set. Harry’s appreciative, open-mouthed hitching breaths urged him on until he pulled off of him at the song’s next lines. 

He found the bottle of lube twisted in his sheets, near Harry’s arm, and readied both of them, then slowly thrust into him eyes closed, still reciting the lyrics. When he opened his eyes, Harry reached a hand between them, working himself slowly. He watched Zayn’s lips intently, green eyes fogged over in desire. Zayn kept mouthing the words until it was too hard to do both at once, jaw falling slack at the building pleasure. 

Harry went first, a groan ripping from him, then a pained expression on his face. The evidence of his orgasm hit his stomach and chest, slid down his knuckles. Zayn watched him, eyes slitting as he stroked into him faster.   
He came apart inside of Harry, at the end of the next track on the album, a song in which the singer urged his lover not to look back, to promise that he’d run. 

**Twenty-Three**

They had a peacefully domestic morning, all things considered. 

Minutes after noon, after Harry had fashioned them a breakfast out of the dregs of Zayn’s refrigerator, Harry disentangled himself from Zayn’s limbs, eager for a shower. Zayn showed him the way, pulled out an extra towel from a shelf. He made sure to instruct him to hold down the toilet handle because it was a bit lazy in flushing these days, how to twist the faucet knob so it wouldn’t drip and then closed the bathroom door. 

Zayn was happy for the few minutes of solitude since Harry had come home with him. He gathered up some of the plates from table, walked them over to the sink and rinsed them. 

As the minutes of solitude stretched on, and the plan for the day came back to him, the solitude became oppressive. He walked around the apartment, desperate to work off his growing anxiety. 

He hadn't realized what he had done until he and Harry were colliding with the shower’s walls, teeth knocking into each other at the force of their kiss. Their slick hands slipped against each other’s skin, failed to find anywhere to grip in the stall. 

It was fast and rough, with Harry slammed against the shower stall door as Zayn fucked him from behind, whispering obscenities in his ear. The steam cloaked them, and the bathroom, in white, made the encounter feel anonymous, let him pretend for a moment that they were other people in an entirely different situation, where there weren't double lives involved.

**Twenty-Four**  
They had agreed to meet at four in the afternoon, on the corner of Zain’s apartment building. Tariq felt it was the most neutral place for them to convene, convinced that Bahaar was being monitored, as well as his apartment. Once they had had a final meeting, crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s of the grim plan, they would each proceed to the target.

Zayn made Harry drive him there an hour early, anxiously twisting his fingers, that were resting in his lap, together and apart, over and over. Harry covered them with his own midway through the trip.

They pulled into the parking lot and Harry cut the engine. The gray sky was quickly turning a deeper shade with the promise of night. Zayn looked around the parking lot, nerve endings on fire, looking for any sign of Marcus or Safiya and Tariq, even though he knew it was still too early for their arrival.

Zayn's fingers trailed along the side of the door. At the corner of the dashboard and door, he decided to go for the wire. It would provide a few, precious minutes of distraction. 

Harry pushed his hands away from the glove compartment. “Too early for that.”

He pointed to the clock. Zayn had over forty-five minutes to get ready.

“Relax,” Harry said. 

Zayn exhaled hard. “Yeah. It’s a bit hard to do that when I might...”

“You won’t. You’ll find out where they’re headed. Police and MI-5 will be there waiting for you and arrest them. I drive you home to my place, we fuck. Happy ending.”

“And if they’re not fast enough? If they find out I’m a spy? I was almost caught last night and...”

Harry cut him off with a kiss, his hand at the back of Zayn’s head, keeping him from pulling away too soon. Zayn relented easily, mouth falling open, letting Harry’s tongue spar with his for a moment. They both strained against their seat belts, prevented from pressing themselves up against each other, using their mouths to make up for the closeness their bodies were starting to desire. Zayn found the thoughts, his fears, falling away with the sweet, little nips that Harry gave his bottom lip, scattered among the lengthier open-mouthed exchanges.

“It’ll be fine,” Harry said with finality, when he pulled away. His faced was relaxed, but his eyes belied the beginnings of the haziness that Zayn had gotten so accustomed to seeing and inducing, last night. 

Zayn nodded, undid his seatbelt and slid closer to the center console, needing to have his hands on Harry. The stressors of the next hours seemed far away when his mind was on other, pleasant things, like that glassy look Harry gave him when he touched him just right. 

With the closer proximity, he was able to angle his head into the crook of Harry’s neck, trace his tongue where Harry’s jaw and neck met. He sucked bruises into his neck. Harry tried to undo his own belt but Zayn liked him restrained this way and stayed his hands over the buckle. 

He pulled away from Harry, whose cheeks were already pink from the cold that the car’s heater had been valiantly trying to battle, and were growing more scarlet from Zayn’s ravenous lips and fingers. Zayn worked his hands horizontally along the hem of the coat where it hit him at the top of his hips, watching the subtle parting of Harry’s lips as his hands landed on the belt buckle.   
Zayn started to pull the tongue of his belt, easing it from the loop. Harry’s hands moved to stop him, but Zayn shrugged them off, slipped the prong from the hole and pulling the two sides apart to allow his fingers easy access to the top button. Harry’s erection strained against his tight jeans and Zayn’s erection twitched in response to the sight. 

He went for the button but Harry’s hands were too fast and blocked him. 

“They’ll see...hear,” Harry said, his voice gone low and gravelly.

“Don’t care,” Zayn said, then put his lips on Harry’s again. He needed this, if only to erase the last memory of another car and this same parking lot. Harry's hands put up a fight, holding court over the area, shielding himself from Zayn's grasp but he grew fed up and pinned the other's wrists to his sides. 

He broke away from the kiss, gave Harry's face a once-over and squeezed his wrists in warning. 

“I can be quiet,” Harry whispered. A devilish smile flicked up the corners of his lips. Zayn suppressed an urge to bite the fleshiest portion of Harry's lips, where it pulled toward the right.

Zayn responded with a curt nod, started back in on the button and his jeans. He pushed up the sideways portion of the seatbelt as Harry rocked his hips forward for easier access. Zayn slid the zipper down, revealing his cock, pressed close to him. He stroked him, for a moment, forehead pressed onto Harry's shoulder, listening to the quiet changes in his breathing. 

Zayn leaned away from him and anchored his hand at the base while he lowered his mouth, taking as much as he could of him at once. His hip knocked against the side of the door where he readjusted himself to better the angle. His lips sealed over Harry again, as he hollowed his cheeks and bobbing his head carefully. He wanted this to go on as long as possible, wanted to work Harry as long as he could, like it would prevent the rest of the day from happening, like their pleasure could stop the world from turning, halt the passage of time. 

He traced his tongue along the vein of Harry's cock, pulling a sharp intake of breath from Harry. His hands went to Zayn's hair, near his nape, putting a little bit of pressure to urge him to take him in deeper. Zayn pushed his hands back toward his sides with more force than he had intended. He gave up fighting and clutched the sides of his chair. Zayn brought his hand back to Harry's cock and resumed stroking and working his lips and tongue up and down. The wetter it got, the longer it went on, the more ragged Harry's breaths grew and slight moans left his throat every so often. 

Though the parking lot was lonely and the skies grew darker in leaps and bounds, and though Simon wasn't on the phone, grading his most recent performance, Zayn still found the exhibition of it intoxicating. The idea that Harry was fighting to keep control, to seem unaffected as Zayn worked him below, almost brought him to the brink, untouched. 

“Fuck, Zayn,” Harry said on a shaky exhale. 

Zayn pulled away from him, with a slurp. He sat up, put his head back on Harry's shoulder, continued tugging him, hands sliding back and forth more easily with the remnants of his spit. Harry rested the base of his head against the seat, mouth open and emitting increasing whimpers. Zayn looked around the parking lot, continuing to jerk Harry, searching for any sign of people who might catch them. They were still alone, and Zayn found himself stroking faster. 

He turned his face into Harry's shoulder, realizing the ragged breathing he'd thought to have been Harry was actually coming from him. Harry noticed Zayn's sounds, too, and brought one of his hands up to Zayn's mouth to quiet him. Zayn was certain he was going to finish off in his pants if he found even a bit of friction to move against, with his hand pumping Harry, and those fingers over his mouth, hips rocking mindlessly.

Then Zayn heard a muffled, “Nah way!” 

It took him a moment longer to process that the words came from outside of the car.

He moved his head slowly, drunk on the promise of an orgasm, toward the source of the sound.

He saw Marcus peering into the car, eyes wide with a mixture of shock and amusement. He held a small paper cup and steam escaped from the opening in the top.

“Oh fuck,” he said, stilling his hand. “Oh fuck.”

Harry's eyes were still closed, his body shaking and stiff in those last few moments before his body would explode, unaware of the intrusion. 

“Harry, Harry,” Zayn said. He took his hand off Harry, started elbowing him. 

“Don't stop,” Harry whimpered. He finally opened his eyes and spurred into action when he saw Marcus. He put a hand over his cock, started to do his pants back up.

Zayn opened the door, not sure whether to attempt damage-control or attempt an inquisition about what he'd seen and if he had an inkling about the duplicitousness of this scene.

“Hey Marcus, I—“ he started. 

He chuckled. “Nah, me sorry to interrupt. Hello to yuh.”

Harry raised his hand, half-heartedly, in greeting. 

“We're just—“ 

“We ready to go. We called four times 'cause we got here early. They sent me to get yuh. Rang yuh bell but yuh nah answer so me come out here. Thought me saw yuh in this car,” Marcus went on.

He pulled out his phone from his pocket and, sure enough, there was a list of missed calls from Safiya and Marcus.

“Tariq is angry as ahl hell. We need to hurry,” he said, gesturing with his cup for Zayn to get out.

“Yeah, okay, okay,” Zayn said and stepped out of the car. 

“Nice to meet yuh,” Marcus told Harry before Zayn shut the door. 

“Glad yuh spent these last minutes that way,” he said as they made their way through the parking lot to the sidewalk. “Me'self fucked two women last night, in celebration.”

Zayn didn't say anything, too weary and still half-aroused to entertain small talk with Marcus. He only concentrated on the fact that even though this was starting earlier than anticipated, it would be finished soon enough. All he had to do was find out where they were headed, then the other operatives would hear and—

Zayn’s heart stopped and his eyes widened. He looked back at the car, and saw Harry, whose own eyes were wide as saucers, leaning into the driver's side window. Terror contorted his brows and lips. 

He had forgotten the wire. 

**Twenty-Five**  
Marcus pointed in the direction of Tariq’s car, where it was parked on the corner.

With each step Zayn took to the car, his heart picked up its staccato beat, ringing in his ears and stifling his attempts to draw air into his lungs. He had tried to get Marcus to turn around, claiming he had left something important, but Marcus had chuckled, joking that the thing he'd left behind was whatever he'd been close to finishing off in the car. 

They continued toward the car, Zayn walking like he was the pall bearer to his own funeral. As they neared, he saw that Safiya sat in the backseat behind Tariq’s driver’s side. The configuration only added to his nausea, knowing she had planned it so that she could spend her final moments next to him. To her, they were star crossed lovers, whose union was torn assunder by their greater desire to change things, how ever misguided. To him, she was just another obstacle. 

Zayn dutifully opened the backseat door as Marcus got into the passenger side. Safiya took off a mitten and took one of his hands in her own. She gave it a squeeze and smiled broadly, her lips painted a festive vermillion shade. He returned her smile feebly, thinking that perhaps this would be a event to fete if his heart had been invested in it. 

“Yuh nah guess where I found Zain,” Marcus said, and Zayn’s hopes that his indiscretion wouldn’t be aired were dashed.

“Where?” Safiya asked.

“In a car outside him building, with him hands down some boy's pants. Had no idea he's a batty boy, right Zain? No wonder yuh charms were lost on him,” he told her. 

Safiya turned to him sharply, a different question on each of her features. He could only look at her blankly, too overwhelmed with everything else to come up with answers she would accept. She pulled her hand away, turned her head to stare out of the window.

Tariq pulled away from the curb, started off on their journey. “We thought you'd backed out,” he said. 

“I could never, yeah?” Zayn answered, weakly. 

They were only two blocks down the road when the plan came back to him. They were going to divvy out the bombs in the car, then go to the targets. If they insisted on all going to one place he would champion the merits of splitting up and covering more ground, separately. He could call in and disclose the targets the others were headed toward. There was still a chance he could get out of this. He had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep a relieved smile from forming.

“So how are we going to do this?” he finally asked. 

“It's already done,” Tariq said, cryptically. He passed a driver, who drove too slowly down the street.

“What?” 

“Just sit back,” Safiya said, dispassionately. Her attention didn't waver from outside. 

“What?” he asked with more urgency.

“They took care a' it Zain,” Marcus piped in. 

He knew another rapid fire question would plant a seed that would only lead to their distrust, so he held back, as much as it physically pained him. 

“We decided on Harrods,” Tariq told him after a beat, “if that's what you're wondering.”

“That building is too histahric not to tek down,” Marcus added. 

“Yeah, okay,” Zayn said, trying to hide his disappointment. It would be harder to break away from them, but it wasn't implausible. “What about the bombs?”

“We don't need them, anymore,” Tariq said.

Zayn kept trying to parse the enigmatic answers, wondering if his nerves were interfering with his comprehension, but he continued to come up just short of the meaning. 

“Wait, so are we not doing this anymore?” he asked.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Zain, the car is the fucking bomb!” Safiya blurted, anger singeing the edges of her words. 

He felt like something in him snapped, like he had momentarily blacked out from the shock of it, because when he looked out the window, the scenery had completely changed from how he had last seen it. Somewhere outside of himself he heard Marcus going on about the car, how Tariq had fashioned a bomb from the materials of his lab, a peroxide-based device, and loaded it under the bonnet of the car. All Tariq had to do was press down on the brake hard enough and they, a few unlucky pedestrians and the Harrod's sign would explode into celestial ephemera. It was easier to execute, without having to worry about four different bombs, and other reasons he didn't hear. Zayn's thoughts were a jumbled mess, the only thought clearly rising above the rest was that there was no way out. 

They were nearing Harrod's, its imposing presence twinkling with Christmas lights against the deep navy sky, and the atmosphere in the car had changed. There was less of the excitement from a few minutes ago, more tentativeness and shallow breathing. 

Zayn looked out his window again, beyond the cars that whizzed by, at the bustling last-minute shoppers on the sidewalks, arms loaded with shopping bags. He scanned them for any sign that they were undercover but he only saw busy, blank, unremarkable faces. 

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he repeated under his breath, as he willed them, anyone, to come in and end this. He tried to hold onto the hope that he'd make it out of this alive, even though his chances grew slimmer with every second.

One of Harrod's awnings held a Christmas tree, erected out of lights, and Zayn saw a memory of his family hanging Christmas lights that last Christmas he had with them. He had been too lazy to assist their efforts, though he claimed to be giving artistic direction from the couch. One glance at a man, walking through the crowd dressed in a Santa Claus outfit, and he saw Niall, face flushed from too many pints, donning a Santa hat and beard that he had nicked from another bar patron. He had been on the dance floor, practically dancing on top of a bemused girl and he had given Zayn a self-satisfied wink, impressed by what he had pulled. A shopper talking on their phone and pacing conjured an image of Liam, roped into performing “Last Christmas” at the first Christmas party he had had with MI-5, while Louis had sung back up and bobbed and snapped in the back. Louis and Liam, in perfectly synchronization, had pointed at Zayn on the last “I'll give it to someone special” lyric while he had scowled from the audience, hating the attention, but secretly loving that he had a pair of friends. 

Then, he saw a floppy haired teenager, who kept ticking his head to brush some of the hair out of his eyes and Zayn saw Harry, his initial coldness, his banana portraits, the way the Christmas lights on his tree had reflected red and green on his skin, how his green eyes said everything and nothing and all the words in between, the shape of his lips and the shapes they made when he was fucked out and pleading for him to go a little bit deeper. He thought maybe this is what love was, pleasant memories of someone's visage, shortly preceding death. 

He looked around the car. Safiya's face was still turned away from him, but she bounced her knees, nervously. Marcus was taking deep, noisy breaths. Tariq's knuckles were pale where his hands gripped the steering wheel. They were one street away. 

It was likely suicide—all roads seemed to lead to suicide now—but he wanted to try. If he could delay detonation, cause Tariq to swerve off course, then maybe he could save a life, maybe he could save his. 

Zayn unbuckled his seatbelt and lunged for Tariq. 

 

Fin.


End file.
